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Emulation (Games) Cloud DRM

Ask Slashdot: How Will Abandonware Work With Today's DRM Locked Games? (youtube.com) 153

Posted by EditorDavid from the DONKEY.BAS dept.
dryriver writes: Thousands of charmingly old-fashioned computer and console games from the 8-bit, 16-bit, MS-DOS era are easily re-playable today in a web browser -- many Abandonware websites now feature play-in-browser emulated games. Here is a video of 101 charming old MS-DOS games, most of which can be re-played on Abandonware websites across the internet in seconds.

But what about today's cloud-linked, DRM crippled games, which won't even work without Steam/Origin/UPlay, and many of which don't even allow you to host your own multiplayer servers anymore? How will we play them 20 years from now -- on what may be Android, Linux or other OSs -- when they are tethered into the cloud? And is writing a fully-working emulator for today's complex Windows/DirectX games even feasible?

How will Abandonware work 20 years from now?
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Ask Slashdot: How Will Abandonware Work With Today's DRM Locked Games? More

Ask Slashdot: How Will Abandonware Work With Today's DRM Locked Games?

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  • same as always (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cederic ( 9623 ) on Sunday August 11, 2019 @05:49AM (#59075854) Journal

    Abandonware is still in copyright (and will continue to be as long as you live), which means that if you want to distribute it, you need to breach its copyright.

    So do what the people distributing games when they're released do and hack it.

    Or just distribute the hacked version. Which is what will happen.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by yeupou ( 785585 )

      The point is not their legal status.

      Many old games, with some effort, are still playable with a few hacks - not cracks.

      It is doubtful that many currents games will still playable in 20 years, no matter if you got license rights.

      That is a good reason to buy game on GOG. It is, in general, a way to help make sure that if game become unplayable, it'll mostly be due to technical issues pertaining to the game itself, not a stuck digital right management system. You can hope to be able to play the Witcher 3 in 20

      • Re:same as always (Score:5, Insightful)

        by rudy_wayne ( 414635 ) on Sunday August 11, 2019 @07:12AM (#59076016)

        The point is not their legal status.

        Many old games, with some effort, are still playable with a few hacks - not cracks.

        It is doubtful that many currents games will still playable in 20 years

        So stop buying today's DRM infested games. Vote with your wallet and let companies know that you don't want their DRM crap. If you aren't willing to do that, then you are part of the problem.

        • So stop buying today's DRM infested games. Vote with your wallet and let companies know that you don't want their DRM crap. If you aren't willing to do that, then you are part of the problem.

          I did.

          So far it is not working.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tepples ( 727027 )

            Vote with your wallet and let companies know that you don't want their DRM crap.

            I did.

            So far it is not working.

            How, specifically, is it not working? There are plenty of titles on GOG and Itch.io without digital restrictions management. You could buy and play any of those.

            • As far I as know there are basically no modern AAA DRM-free titles released on GOG. The ones you see are either comparatively old (at least two-three years of age which means their publisher has already earned enough money not to care about the fate of a game being released on this platform) or not triple-A.

              There are just too few of us who eschew DRM-laden games. And then there are cases when source code is lost and a particular game will never lose the shackles of a digital prison.

              • Age of Wonders Planetfall is on GOG also Cyberpunk 2077 next year as well.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by tepples ( 727027 )

                The ones you see [on DRM-free game stores] are either comparatively old (at least two-three years of age which means their publisher has already earned enough money not to care about the fate of a game being released on this platform) or not triple-A.

                Then play those instead. Solution get!

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Uberbah ( 647458 )

                  As per the previous reply that's what he's already doing. But he's not having any effect on EA/Ubi et all using DRM, anymore than people who drive 30 miles out of their way to avoid shopping at Walmart are having any effect on that corporation's business practices.

                  • I don't get this silly mentality which expects that if you just do the right things, the world will change to make you happy. I didn't switch to Linux because I wanted Windows to change; I switched to Linux because it made me happier than windows. I dont give a flying fuck if windows ever changes or not.

                    YOU need to do things which make you happy. If you're doing that then who gives a fuck if others change or not?

                • It's even better because if everyone did just play the games at that point in their cycle the developers would have already written them off as flops because of DRM.

                  The problem is most people are too addicted to always playing the hot new game and can't wait 2-3 years. Most gamers, it seems, fail the marshmallow test.

            • The point of the article isn't that you can buy and play other games, the point is that in 20 years the next generation won't be able to play many of the games from today. Those will be lost experiences.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Uberbah ( 647458 )

          Vote with your wallet and let companies know that you don't want their DRM crap.

          People have. EA and Ubisoft couldn't care less, anymore than people driving 30 miles out of their way to avoid shopping at Walmart has forced that company to change their business practices.

        • It's the tragedy of the commons. If everyone stopped buying DRM infested crap, we'd all be better off. If a few people stop, they will personally be in a less favorable position (since presumably they want to play the game), and the company and everyone buying the software will be unaffected.

          We're in a Nash-equlibrium where each game buyer who chooses to buy the game cannot improve their position by unilaterally choosing not to buy the game.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Z80a ( 971949 )

        Many of the old games are cracked exactly like the today games.
        Some dude went in the code, found the locking code and bypassed it, both in terms of those password games, and games that check for purposeful physical defects on the disk etc..
        So it will keep being the case forever.

        • With always-online came another problem, i.e. that you don't actually get the whole game to play because part of it is constantly being kept on the manufacturer's server. As soon as the server is gone, that part of the game is gone and you probably can't even fully launch it, let alone play it.

          There is effectively nothing you can crack because it's not just some obstacle that keeps you from accessing the game, you simply don't even have everything at hand.

          • People sometimes go to the effort of writing a server, like MaNGOS for WoW.

            • No, I'm literally talking about a game that exists to some degree only online. Imagine that you have to download the whole level and its general makeup with only the textures, graphics and other heavy lifting material being with you, but the layout, the position, the texturing information and everything residing on a server. All you actually have is a collection of graphics and materials with zero information where to put anything in the world. Not just a server telling your computer where to put a goblin,

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Z80a ( 971949 )

                You still can pretend you're the game and download all the stuff from the server, and then create a fake server that give this data to the game.
                Now what really wrecks everything is the streaming shit like STADIA, this one to preserve, you have to literally break in google and steal the harddrive data.

                Or upload a game that is literally a virus that do it for you.

                • There's even defences against such attempts where you get fed bogus information every now and then that the real client would react differently to, and once the server "knows" you're not a benign client, it starts feeding you bullshit to invalidate what you already have. It's fairly nontrivial to write such a data gatherer that behaves properly and like a normal player and it's fairly easy to spot harvesters.

                  The only way to really counter this is to not hand money to those that make games like these.

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by Z80a ( 971949 )

                    While it is a "cat and mouse" game, you only need to get all the data once to win. It's a game rigged in favor of the pirates.

      • Re:same as always (Score:5, Interesting)

        by lgw ( 121541 ) on Sunday August 11, 2019 @08:49AM (#59076220) Journal

        Many old games, with some effort, are still playable with a few hacks - not cracks.

        Bullshit. DRM, which used to be called "copy protection" has been around as long as commercial games. GOG cracks the game as part of preparing it for sale on their site. On a good day, the source code is still around and they can just remove the DRM and re-build.

        I've heard the for Diablo 1, they went to even more heroic lengths than usual, as the source code had been lost, and some changes were needed to even run on modern systems. They recreated source from object, and went from there. I hope they at least had debug symbols from the retail build.

        I've been involved with projects like that, back in the day: you have the legal rights, you have the object code, but you don't have the source code. It's a lot of "fun".

        That is a good reason to buy game on GOG. It is, in general, a way to help make sure that if game become unplayable, it'll mostly be due to technical issues pertaining to the game itself, not a stuck digital right management system. You can hope to be able to play the Witcher 3 in 20 years.

        Bad example, as GOG and CD Project Red are part of the same conglomerate, and don't like DRM. The awesome thing about GOG is that games with nasty DRM on other platforms are clean on GOG.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Copy protection didn't used to be all that effective though. It was only when games starting having to be connected to servers that it became effective, first as a way to prevent people playing the online part of the game and then as a way of preventing them playing at all.

          When vital parts of the game content are only available on the server and never even sent out to the client, it's pretty much impossible to pirate it.

          An additional problem is that while some games can be played offline they are mostly onl

          • There were DRM schemes which were pretty effective. StarForce CD-ROM's one was quite effective and kept people at bay for years as one example. Dongles are still effective, especially with on-board code segment encryption, because a lot of vertical market CAD software (Mastercam) still used them.

            However, there are a few reasons why most companies are moving to having everything serverside. The first is that they can easily ban anyone that gives them trouble, and they can ban by any trigger (machine ids,

        • For Diablo 1, you're right about the debug tables helping. It turns out there was a port to Playstation, and Sony messed up and there were some build files left on the Japanese release of the game. These were then used by the new team to reverse engineer the source code.

      • Many old games, with some effort, are still playable with a few hacks - not cracks.

        I grew up in the era of code wheels and weirdly sectors floppies. Even if you owned a legitimately purchased copy it was to your benefit to get it cracked.

        • Video gaming from the dawn of time on the Apple ][ was about copy protection and defeating it, back to using a sector copier on Ultima 1, or a hardware card that would pop a non maskable interrupt to the 6502, and dump what is in RAM to a floppy, which did a great job of bypassing copy protection on some games that did a lot of boot gymnastics, but got you to a known state asking for a data disk.

          I've seen some clever protection schemes along those lines. Some like what Origin used in Ultima 6 and 7 where o

        • I bought a Commodore 64 game called "Below the Root" back in the day. Full price, around $60 of 1980's money. I don't know what copy protection it used but assume it was a weird sectoring scheme. When trying to load the game from the legit original floppy that came in the box it rejected it as a copy and actually tried to format the floppy (which failed because there was no notch cut in the disk).

          I took it back to the store (Toys R Us) and exchanged it for another copy which did the exact same thing.
      • bullshit. while the DRM was simpler back in the 80's and 90's it was still their and most games required hacking. DRM smply was called copy protection etc.

        • bullshit. while the DRM was simpler back in the 80's and 90's it was still their and most games required hacking. DRM smply was called copy protection etc.

          Modern DRM is nothing like copy protection, modern drm is pervasive, and it's really just stealing your software application and holding it hostage on a company server using public internet. That's all that's happening.

          To say modern drm is like the 80's nad 90's misses out internet had not reached critical mass until roughly 2000. Then the great videogame theft began as households count be counted on to have internet, aka it made stealing videogames profitable.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Copyright only matters if there is someone to enforce it. With many of these games the ownership is unclear at best, so it's uncertain of anyone has legal standing.

      In any case, there is still a need to preserve these games. Even if you own the original disks they won't last forever, and now with DRM and mandatory online requirements you might be lucky if you get 2-3 years out of them.

      • There is zero need to play or preserve these games. Once you understand that you will understand why there is no problem. It's like asking who will preserve the cotton candy you are about to eat. Nobody. It will eventually be shit out of your system and finally be where you should have left it in the first place.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tepples ( 727027 )

          There is zero need to play or preserve these games.

          I'm having trouble inferring your reasoning behind this. Do you claim that that video games are not art, or that art is not worth preserving, or both?

          It's like asking who will preserve the cotton candy you are about to eat.

          Do you also claim that cookbooks, such as one describing how to make cotton candy, are not worth preserving?

          • You probably are having trouble inferring because I never implied; I stated that there is no need to preserve them. To your ridiculous assertion that all art must be preserved, we don't worry about preserving most art either. For every Mona Lisa there are hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of paintings that get thrown in the trash.

            "Do you also claim that cookbooks, such as one describing how to make cotton candy, are not worth preserving?"

            I never said C and C ++ shouldn't be preserved, nor that the a

          • I'm having trouble inferring your reasoning behind this. Do you claim that that video games are not art, or that art is not worth preserving, or both?

            If you want to preserve something precious or sentimental to you then by all means go ahead and do so. We all do that to some degree. But to answer your question no not all video games are art and no, not all art is worth preserving. The claim otherwise is to be like my mother who saved every piece of finger painting I ever did from kindergarten as if it was some priceless heirloom that would eventually end up in an art gallery. Now some video games certainly are art and some certainly are worth preserv

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by tepples ( 727027 )

              Now some video games certainly are art and some certainly are worth preserving but the key word there is some.

              Who, using what criteria, determines which video games are worth preserving?

              • I'm a self-described authority on the subject. Tell me the name of a game and I'll tell you if it's art.

              • Now some video games certainly are art and some certainly are worth preserving but the key word there is some.

                Who, using what criteria, determines which video games are worth preserving?

                Th IRL equivalent of mod points.

            • Art is art no matter how bad it is. there is reason to preserve the bad as well as the good. If you don't remember the mistakes of the past you're prone to repeat them. For example, if you only save examples of games with good design and delete all games with bad design, this doesn't actually encourage good design going forward, it encourages the next generation to try the bad ideas again, since they'll appeal novel.

          • I'm having trouble inferring your reasoning behind this. Do you claim that that video games are not art, or that art is not worth preserving, or both?

            For most people, games are ephemeral entertainment. The novelty of sharing a new experience with many other players is a big component that goes away if you try to dust off old copies of the game 20 years from now.

            I think watching someone play it on YouTube is the most likely way people will experience an old game. Because at least with streaming there is some social aspect to it, without the onerous cost of running it or playing it yourself.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Your signature contains a Third Rock quote. What if I were to argue that Third Rock is akin to something you shit out in the 90s and the DVD box set is a complete waste of valuable plastics?

          Just because you don't like any modern games doesn't make them worthless.

          • "Your signature contains a Third Rock quote. What if I were to argue that Third Rock is akin to something you shit out in the 90s and the DVD box set is a complete waste of valuable plastics?"

            You would be correct.

            "Just because you don't like any modern games doesn't make them worthless."

            I didn't say they were worthless. I said there is no need to preserve them. Stop trying to build straw men. You suck at it.

          • Yeah. Historians will thank us for our "we deleted most of the entertainment because we decided it wasn't 'high art' enough so not worth preserving" efforts.

        • "I feel zero need to play or preserve these games"

          FTFY

          And don't worry, broham, I don't feel that need either. But some people do. Stop shitting on their lunch.

        • I disagree. Sure, most games are not worth preserving. I agree. The 200th Madden, the 300th Battlefield or the 600th Call of Duty, why bother? Along with the million copycat games that every successful game spawned like some sort of disease. How many "Minecraft-meets-Zombie-shooters" are there now?

          But once in a while, something new arises. A genre-defining game that does something new or simply a really well made game that people would like to be able to point towards when someone tries to pretend that the

          • ... and again, there is no need to preserve it. We may desire to do so, but there is no need. People need to learn the difference between a fact and a feeling, and the difference between a need and a desire, or this country is forever fucked. This is why the US is in such a clusterfuck state right now. Some bitch comes out and says some people feel differently; that there are alternative facts ... they feel like Trump is on their side. Suddenly the assertion that Trump is a man of the people becomes just as

            • Well, there isn't exactly a need to do anything. If you're not against the idea of dying, you don't even need to breathe.

              Are you deliberately trying to take this to a ridiculous level or what is the goal of your argument?

            • People need to learn the difference between a fact and a feeling, and the difference between a need and a desire

              All you really "need" is air, water, sufficient calories and an environment that lets you maintain a safe body temperature.

              Everything else is a feeling.

            • Well, there's no need to wear any clothes other than a hessian sack by the same measure. All we really need is bread and water and the occasional fuck to pop out babies, and we can live in simple concrete huts with no electronics, or books for that matter. There's no "need" for anything else.

              "Need" isn't an absolute, it's relative. You seem to be arguing that since video games aren't 100% required for basic survival there's no "need" associated. Well, same with anything really. From the perspective of histo

        • "There is zero need to play or preserve these games."

          This is the same short sighted thinking as the people who decided to dump the DuMont Network library of TV shows into the East River. Out of 20,000+ shows only 350 are known to survive. Because of this the ten episodes of 'The Gallery of Madam Liu-Tsong', the first American program with an Asian-America lead, is gone. No episode exist. No scripts exist.

          The BBC destroyed many of their programs as well. About 90 episodes of Dr. Who's first six years are mis

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • They still can be studied via let's plays on youtube and the like, something that was hardly an option in DOS times before ubiquitous Internet. In fact in many new games gameplay is so cruddy and ergonomics so poor that let's play is actually a better option.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lgw ( 121541 )

        City of Heroes was shut down over the strident objections of it's player base many years ago. Apparently, it has been completely re-created now on private servers, and you can play again.

        Vanilla WoW was long gone, but fans re-created it on private servers, which worked fine until Bliz shut them down, to pave the way for WoW Classic.

        Preserving these games isn't something one person can do, but it is possible, as long as the expected behavior of the game remains in living memory. All of the art assets, at l

    • first, hackers are often cracking a game for the fame of cracking it first. They often don't crack the final version. A bud of mine has several mid to late 2000s PC strategy games that are unplayable thanks to Games for Windows live that have never had the DRM removed in the patch versions but the unpatched versions are basically unplayable.

      Then there's games that are shipped unfinished and rounded out with DLC. Street Fighter 4 comes to mind.

    • Or just distribute the hacked version. Which is what will happen.

      You've missed the point of the article. It won't happen, because a big hunk of the game code never leaves the distributor's own servers. In the case of streamed games, none of the game code ever sees the users' PCs or game consoles. When the distributor packs up the servers and goes home, that's it. No more game.

  • They don't. Games as a service does suck. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Zarhan ( 415465 ) on Sunday August 11, 2019 @05:57AM (#59075866)

    Ross Scott has been ranting about this for quite some time, recently made a video about it (quite long, but covers a lots of bases). He later did some clarifications after some lawyers actually provided a bit more insights (essentially: US is a lost cause, EU might have some hope). Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com].

    That said, for single player games the tried-and-true method of finding a crack and playing through is still possible. Even if you get the game from Steam or something, the assets are still local to your hard drive - so you can just install a crack. Multiplayer element is of course gone, but that's just how it goes.

    The real problem will be the streaming of games, e.g. Stadia service. Assuming that they somehow solve all the issues caused by latency (big if, but let's assume it's doable at least in urban areas) you don't even get the content. Creating an offline version of a streamed game is going to be a major hurdle - instead of patching an EXE you essentially need to grab a bunch of snapshot of the streaming cache and hope that the actual executable code can be patched to run offline. Essentially only things you can hope for is that someone leaks the code.

    For me, this doesn't really matter all that much. I do still play games, but lately my focus has been a lot on the more "indie" side of games anyway than AAA titles. Yes, I did like e.g. GTA V, but, well, I have played that one through once, whereas I've played through all the Shadowrun games from Harebrained (Rebirth, Dragonfall, Hong kong) three times already. Guess what kind of developers will be getting my money?

    As such, personally losing the heritage of AAA gaming history is not an issue for me, but as a wider issue killing games is comparable to burning books - and it might have more significant results than Jack Thompson could have ever imagined.

    I sort of hope that the streaming games concept will fail (but I know it doesn't, at least unless the publishers completely fumble their pricing structure). I have no problem with streaming as such, but the difference is that if something is published via Spotify I can still download the MP3 or even purchase a CD. Heck, if all else fails, for any non-interactive content I can just record it from the video/audio outputs. For games, this is not really a possibility.

    • Re:They don't. Games as a service does suck. (Score:4, Informative)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Sunday August 11, 2019 @06:38AM (#59075940) Homepage Journal

      The latency issues for streaming games area already solved. Same for non-streaming online games. The fix is that they just add a consistent amount of artificial lag.

      Street Fighter V is a great example. The series was originally a twitch fighting game, but to accommodate online play they added 133ms of input lag. Even in offline mode, when you press a button it takes 133ms to react. In online mode the game sends your button press and a time stamp immediately, meaning anything less than 133ms of internet lag is hidden by the built-in input lag.

      Most modern games do it that way, adding input lag that the player simply adapts to and doesn't notice.

      We are going to have to rely on leaks of streamed games and game servers. Hopefully people in the games industry are keeping backups to leak in a decade or so. Sometimes they come out of bankruptcy auctions too.

    • The problem is in many cases it is the old Big Iron - Dumb Terminal design. Your computer only has enough smarts to do things with the information supplied, not run the backend that is deciding what information you get.

  • Answer (Score:3)

    by Artem S. Tashkinov ( 764309 ) on Sunday August 11, 2019 @06:00AM (#59075870) Homepage

    Cloud based/dependent games are fucked. There are already dead/unsupported cloud-based games which don't work and there are no workarounds.

    Offline games will work given someone has bothered to crack them (crack groups usually crack relatively popular title and usually ignore less popular/flops).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Not necessarily. Something as big as WoW will likely have fully functional private servers long after its demise.

      Less popular "always online DRM" games however are likely to die, as no one will bother to leak their server software.

      • Basically no publishers nowadays release server side code for their games which means WoW is a rare exception which proves the rule.

        If art aficionados are concerned it's high time we enact a law which mandates that a game source code must be released 20 years after support for it was ceased. I presume 20 years are enough to make any proprietary software algorithms largely irrelevant.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by lgw ( 121541 )

          WoW definitely didn't release any server side code! That's why Bliz shut down the private servers when WoW Classic was near.

          Vanilla WoW servers were just one of many heroic fan efforts to re-create the entire server side from scratch.

          If art aficionados are concerned it's high time we enact a law which mandates that a game source code must be released 20 years after support for it was ceased

          If the source still exists someone like GOG will buy the IP and sell the game. Even if the source doesn't exist, the game can be re-created if the fan base is there to justify the effort.

          • Which means the most loyal gamers who happened to be talented coders/programmers as well, reversed engineered WoW server protocol and basically recreated the server side of the game. Wow! Now do you realistically believe there will be an effort like this for other games? I really really doubt we'll ever get more than a handful of games working without vendor's own server code this way.

            Relying on the fan base just won't work in absolute most cases. Also, modern games are obsessed with DRM/obfuscation/encry

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by lgw ( 121541 )

              Now do you realistically believe there will be an effort like this for other games? I really really doubt we'll ever get more than a handful of games working without vendor's own server code this way.

              Yup. Same thing happened for City if Heroes. I've heard there are fan servers for the original Star Wars Galaxies, but I can't confirm.

              Most games are bad, and no one will miss them, just like every kind of entertainment. No one will ever care if several seasons of a random reality TV show are lost forever. No one will ever care that Roster Update 2013 is lost forever. But games that made a real impact on people will be saved, one way or another.

              Things will largely improve as the likelyhood of losing th

  • It won't. If some piece of the game needs to run on a company server, then when the company shuts the server down it ain't going to work.
  • Many 20-30 Abandonware games I play are the cracked versions. Back in ye olden days DRM was code wheels and manuals.

  • Simple (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AntiSol ( 1329733 ) on Sunday August 11, 2019 @07:41AM (#59076082)

    It won't. 50 years from now historians will be lamenting the massive black hole of lost data and useless encrypted binary blobs that is the early 21st century's legacy. It'll be kind of like those lost Doctor Who episodes, only on a massive scale - imagine if 5% of the doctor who tapes weren't lost and the rest were gone forever. More like that. Interestingly, it'll be all the little indie titles that didn't have DRM that will still exist.

    Maybe there will be careful reverse engineering projects for some of the most beloved and iconic games. I seem to recall that there's some exemption to DRM anti-circumvention laws for archival purposes, so perhaps some of those projects won't even be sued into oblivion and you'll be able to fire up a modified version of Borderlands or GTA5 that's actually playable. But there sure won't be a library of virtually every game from this era playable in your browser.

    I'm glad you've had this thought occur to you. After all, we've only been trying to tell you this for the best part of 20 years now ("we" being "those crazy conspiracy theorist paranoid freak anti-drm nerds who really just want to pirate stuff and are totally evil and definitely don't have any valid points"). Welcome!

  • How will we play them 20 years from now -- on what may be Android, Linux or other OSs -- when they are tethered into the cloud?

    Yes of course, Android and Linux will be the primary operating systems in 20 years and both Windows and macOS are just "other OSs" according to you. Microsoft and Apple have been dying for the last 20 years and they're still on top. Microsoft despite their track records and Apple despite being more expensive and tied to Apple hardware only. Even free, Linux has only be able to gain

  • How? (Score:3)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Sunday August 11, 2019 @07:51AM (#59076094)

    Not at all!
    That was kind of the point.

  • Same as all cloud stuff... (Score:4, Informative)

    by DidgetMaster ( 2739009 ) on Sunday August 11, 2019 @07:59AM (#59076112) Homepage
    ...it is gone when the cloud provider quits providing the service. If they go bankrupt. If the development team loses interest. If they just get greedy and cut you off if you decide not to pay their new extortion rates. Your data becomes inaccessible. Your service goes away. Period.

  • At some point when the big boys decide they don't want to main cloud infrastructure anymore for games that less than 1% of their player base is using and innovative company will come along and offer them revenue for keeping the old games alive.

    or ...

    They will just fade into oblivion, never to be seen or heard from again and their companies and creators remembered no more.

  • Duplicating the experience of these cloud and streaming games, even if you had the server code in escrow, would be impossible. Why? Because there's no such thing as "Game X" in the same sense there was with shipped software. Cloud based software is a never-ending continuum of development, not a single artifact [that maybe gets some bugfixes and DLC later]. The game you play tomorrow, or the game you play in China, is not the same game you play today, or the same game you play in the US, because cloud softwa

  • ...what about the tech that's in vehicles? Ford, for one, has abandoned features like Vehicle Health Reports, and and many Sync features even while the vehicles are still under warranty. Of course, there's no recourse at all.

    I know it's not an either/or, but I'd rather have a brick on my bookshelf than in my driveway.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by larwe ( 858929 )
      Don't get me started. And that's not even counting the fact that these systems- while they're working- are working for the _car vendor_, not for you. I won't buy a car that has a connection back to the mothership, period.

      • Don't get me started. And that's not even counting the fact that these systems- while they're working- are working for the _car vendor_, not for you. I won't buy a car that has a connection back to the mothership, period.

        Yeah, Ford's privacy policy (which I actually read) really distills down to "All your base are belong to us."

  • Since OP posted a 101 Dos games video as an example of still-functioning games, note that most of those games are barely functional. By themselves, they will not run on a modern computer or operating system without assistance of third party utilities (e.g. DOSBox, VirtualBox, etc.) Even so, at least one of the games in the video is barely running properly (e.g. Mega Man looks like it's running on the fast side - typical with games from that era.)

    In any case, that video shows how it's solved - write an emula

  • Why I got out of the industry (Score:3)

    by dcollins ( 135727 ) on Sunday August 11, 2019 @09:18AM (#59076322) Homepage

    I worked in computer games for some years in the late 90's. This was a large part of my thinking that prompted me to quit the industry permanently (not the only reason, but when I think back on it nowadays it's the first thing that came to mind).

    Note that the positive examples in the OP are all MS-DOS games. My industry experience was in the transition to Windows 95 native. I worked on a triple-A racing title that used fairly specialized low-level code; to my knowledge that game was unplayable after about 10 years. The second company I worked at was an all-online digital collectible game company (MTG wannabe), and this was very much on my mind. Spending my life's work on something so incredibly ephemeral that it almost immediately disappeared like a ghost of history troubled me greatly.

    Arguably games that could be archived and emulated/played forever was a teeny-tiny, abnormal slice of computer game history right at the start. Maybe I've got old-man disease that my expectation for ownership and archiving should be anything different.

    • Maybe I've got old-man disease that my expectation for ownership and archiving should be anything different.

      No it means you're an adult who gives a shit, the reason why our world is so corrupt is because there are so many who don't. It's not just games we're losing, we now have infinite copyright extension on all cultural works effectively.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • There are people who cry about this? Must be gamers living in their mom's basement. The rest of us will survive.

  • But I'm not horribly arsed about it because I generally only play old single player games, or free multiplayer games (and I don't buy shit in the games either.) So at least I'm not actually paying to be abused. By the time I get a game, there's usually an assortment of deprotects. Sometimes it's so old that an official patch has removed the protection. And where there isn't, I've paid a pittance at most.

    Thanks, everybody, who actually buys new AAA games. Keep 'em coming!

  • To the public domain when the copy right expires. That means all the source code for games and the machine to run the game. For music it should also include the master recordings. Anyone who no longer has the ability to do that should lose the copy right, be fined and have to pay back some of the money collected in royalties. For things like commercial software that is still used in production environments this is critical. For other things this is about preserving our culture. So the BBC can't claim

  • The software companies won't give a damn.

  • We don't need to think far into the future to know they die. Look at EA titles. Many of their games get the servers shut down in a few years or less. They lose partial or complete functionality. I've got xbox one games that already are crippled.

    Conversely, I've got Sega Genesis games that are still playable from EA. Three of my favorite sports titles are still playable on my genesis but trying to play NBA Jam's updated game from like 5 years ago and you'll find half the features are already shutdown. Ba

  • And nobody will care. Technology is destroying memory. Simple as that. Will you be able to read your Kindle book 20 years from now? Doubtful. I can take a 30 year old book down from my shelf and access information I kinda remember from then, but, in the digital world, will that be possible? No. Same with everything digital. There is a shrinking "digital history horizon," that will obliterate most things in time as the pace of technical change accelerates.
  • ... it vanishes more sooner than later, is rightfully forgotten about, and that is not just about games. Just think of all the cloud-tied hardware gadgets currently sold. Household appliances used to be usable for decades, now they are broken beyond repair once their "cloud service" becomes unavailable.

  • this and that (Score:3)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Monday August 12, 2019 @01:32AM (#59078100) Homepage Journal

    For most games, the DRM lock is really just copy protection. We've been breaking that for as long as I've had a computer (35 years) and it'll continue to get broken. No issue there.

    The problem is with games that have an actual server component, where part of the content isn't on your drive or only gets streamed there when you access that particular region. Some MMOs for example (though most still drop everything on your harddrive for performance reasons and to save bandwidth).

    That stuff - will simply be gone once the publisher goes out of business. It's not the first time in the history of mankind that a lot of our works simply disappear. We'll survive, but there will be a hole in the records.

    Not that games really is the #1 thing that historians are interested in, so the vast majority even of scholars won't even notice that gap.

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