Awesome Episode :D Loved it. Love seeing Clint come on and seems we had a similar......restricted games history for the same reasons :D Loved the story and chat about Mem management in DOS. Little known fact: The main reason WWIII hasn't broken out yet is, no one knows how to free up enough base mem to launch :D Also.....Clint.....knock knock knock :D
I'm now 58 yrs old, back in the days of MS-DOS, I could recite my config.sys and autoexec.bat from memory (brain). I could consistently beat QEMM in getting the most base memory free on my PC's (dont forget to include the monochrome grahics card space, that was rarely used). I was an IT consultant for 25 yrs, I retired from it in 2021. I now play in my shed, with my PC's, amiga's, retro consoles, and HAM radios 🙂. Keep up the great work guys...
A wild Clint appears! All my favorite creators colliding makes for a good Saturday morning. Almost as good as the days of Lucky Charms and Looney Tunes. Almost.
Using old floppies for ICBMs is actually pretty clever. It introduces an 'air gap' to the procedure for security, and the format is not easily duplicated due to its obsolescence. I would keep this system going as long as humanly possible.
I totally get the Ultima parent issues. When I came home with my dad from picking up my first computer, an Atari 520ST, he had let me pick out ONE game. So I picked Ultima III (with the demon on the box) because that's what I watched my friends play. We get home and my mom sees the game box and sends us right back to return the game. We ended up getting Ultima IV instead...the box art was MUCH less....less...demonic. It got to stay.
I loved Postal 1s copy protection, everybody on the map would catch fire and start blaming the player. I fully agree the game devs should release the server when they takes games off-line. There is no loss to them and games used to ship with local server versions all the time.
@@hisham_hm true but local language play should be a things developers still included.. instead you have Devs doing really crappy things like with X-com 2: servers shutdown and LAN play also disabled in the last update... Although not on all versions. apparently.
Glad you cleared up the LED thing as I was thinking "Hrmm...I did see a video about that already...", but I didn't remember it was on the LGR channel :D Regarding a personal story: Unlike Clint who seems to really have embraced the Win95 hype back then, I was strongly opposed to using Windows and I used DOS with Norton Commander for as long as possible, which was also the better fit for most games I played. At some point a friend got his PC. I think it was some new Pre-Built-PC a tech-savy uncle or so he got from an uncle. But...he was a bit desparate: That PC had Windows 95 on it. How could he possibly use it? Well, no worries. I came to the rescue, formated his PC, and put a (pirated) version of DOS on it, together with a (pirated) version of Norton Commander. My friend was relieved and everyone was happy. Except of this uncle I guess...
As you suggest, there's nothing new about Unreal Mode, so no-one should be expecting some miracle change to ease their retro DOS adventures because of it having been 'rediscovered'. It is technically interesting for sure. I worked extensively with Unreal Mode, and still maintain a commercial program that uses it to this day (probably one of the oldest still maintained DOS programs). I don't know precisely when I first implemented it as the current source control only goes back 20 years! A tip for any coders going down the rabbit hole in case it's not covered elsewhere; use a standard data selector for the stack, not a stack selector as you might expect, or else some DOS programs you run after your own won't run, especially those compiled with Borland.
Getting Dune II and Wrath of Earth to work with both mouse and sound support was an enormous challenge back in the day, especially as many programs also had memory leaks and would crash frequently if close to their limit. I really like the idea of not needing to worry about this stuff.
I once spent a morning turning the Jet Set Willy colour copy protection into letters. (red="R", etc...) if there's anything 80s kids had, it's time, which they would gladly use in the pursuit of piracy.
@@FatNorthernBigot Agreed. We were providing a necessary service in case the original card was lost...although I must admit that even I didn't attempt to make a backup of the JSW 2 card!
Excellent episode! Regarding Game Copy World, etc., we really have lost a lot of resources for preserving games over the years that even The Wayback Machine can't solve. That's why I tend to make backups of whatever I can. I have old versions of software that can indeed save the day in certain specific circumstances. Now thinking of it I will upload everything to the Internet Archive in some spare time soon.
On the subject of blue LEDs. They were rare and expensive for a few years. I think the first one I ever saw was on a PS2 dev kit in ‘99. I also remember hearing that they cost Sony $10 each at launch.
Yes. If it wasn’t for software archivists like the “pirates”, most games from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s would be lost or completely forgotten. They are the only reason computer & console game preservation are as good as they are.
8:00 Cartridges never pirated? There were millions of pirated cartridges for Nintendo and Sega consoles back in the day. Most of Asians, Latin American and Russian kids in the 90s played with pirated games and clone consoles.
Hi guys, awesome episode as always. Regarding 42:20 - the video description is missing the link to the train track technology video though. Would be great if you could add it!
I used the reg edit fix for SafeDisk when I got a copy of Sim Golf from my dad. I think I needed to download a hotfix on Windows 8 before the reg edit can work to toggle SafeDisc on/off. I’ll be trying this new option. Also, I do remember the difficulty of squeezing every k out of memory to finally get Ultima 7 to run. You had to be there. The first puzzle to solve in many DOS games was the memory puzzle.
I can confirm that on Amiga the boot floppy with custom "startup-sequence" file in the "S" directory would work exactly like a custom "autoexec.bat". Just make a bootable disk, add the "startup-sequence". All that file needed to do was "CD" to the game directory on the HD (for instance "cd DH1:games/worms") in the first line, then the second line would simply be "worms.exe" to execute the game.
@@duncanstyles133 Well yeah, but this is about conserving memory when loading games on a stock A600 with HD, which that menu will definitely use some of.
@@005AGIMA Loading from hard disk doesn't just save disk swapping, it's several times faster. A game that takes 2 minutes from floppy will typically load in less than 10 seconds from an IDE hard disk of the day.
About blue LEDs .. when they first appeared in Maplin (an electronics retailer which is sadly long gone, like the other electronics stores we had) they retailed at £10 each! The next year they dropped to £2, then I guess the flood gates opened. *→ETA←* Also, I REALLY hate those *blinding* bluish "now-you-see-me-now-you-don't" headlights some cyclists use, aimed at eye level, leaving a trail of spots on the retinas of oncoming pedestrians and motorists. Those should be illegal. And cycling on pavements .. oh, that *_is!!_*
DRM only hurts the paying customer. And it helps nobody. The few studies that have been conducted on the topic show that piracy does not harm the profits from game sales. The people who were going to pirate in the first place were never going to pay anyhow. I'd also kind of promise you this: If Steam said tomorrow that Denuvo was no longer allowed on any games sold on their platform, after the table-flipping baby-rage from the different publishers, Steam would see an increase in sales. Maybe not a significant increase, but a very noticeable one. You might have a small handful of devs leave the platform, but the vast majority of them would stay because Steam is - for better or for worse - the most effective and profitable way to distribute PC games and there's very little sign that's changing anytime soon.
I hate blue LEDs. I bought a Fractal case for my Plex server and it had a blue LED for the power light that I had to unhook because it lit the whole room with the lights off and made it hard to sleep. Later I hooked it back up as the HDD activity light.
My rackmount VGA KVM is the same way. I've actually gone in and increased the current limiting resistor THREE TIMES, but while it gets a little bit dimmer with each swap, it's still a spotlight. I don't mind SPARING use of blue LEDs, so some day I will replace it with one that is diffused and/or has a lower output rating.
Memory management. I recall writing a statement in college of how messed up it was with all the three letter acronyms. This is not my college statement but (no Google) do you know what the following three letter acronyms are? DOS can use extenders such as 4GW. Making use of UMB in the UMA with the HIMEM.SYS driver saving space on DCM. Using an EMM driver such as EMM386.SYS you can gain access to EMS (or XMS) above 1Mb. As the driver enables the CPU's MMU to remap memory for DOS applications (you know games). DOS was definitely over stretched.
Boot discs! I had totally forgotten about them as a way to get enough conventional memory, yeah I think a few DOS games I used to have provided that in manuals. I just used memaker and let it do it's thing...
Lotus Turbo Esprit on the CPC had what could be the most difficult copy protection of a laser cut hole in the disc and the game required 'write enabled'. If disc was READ ONLY the game would not start and If read after write came back as not having a known value with the missing bit or bits you tell it was a copy and not go any further. Some even used this technique to part of the game itself (re-wrote the sector and on next startup would crash the game).
Not sure who this guy is. But being interested in mouse I will for sure dig into his channel! Have good weekend guys. p.s. That sponsor spot is starting to become uncanny professional!
Last week I was question of the week, this week I'm in Dave's housekeeping.... Guys, if you just want me to take over from Chris full time, you just have to ask! ;)
Well Clint... there's an interesting video idea right there, ''Christian knock-off games'' . I'd watch that for sure !! (Maybe a blerb..? if the topic is too dicy for YT already)
I'm with you Dave. I hate blue light of any kind. I was a subscriber to MVG. He moved and in his new place he started to film from this room lit up totally in blue light. I unsubscribed straight away. Looking back maybe it was a bit over the top as I do like his videos. Maybe I'll have another look sometime to see if he still has that set up.
Clint hasn't played any Ultima games? I'm pretty sure that is a sin. I played my first Ultima game on my Atari 800xl. We (my older brother and I) played it for 24 hours straight, and we wondered if we could cook an egg on the PSU brick at the end of that. One of these days I will play through all of them in order.
Pirates are probably part of the reason why Sony/Microsoft will move away from hardware eventually. All consoles get hacked, modded, sliced and diced to run homebrew, pirated software and ROMS. Take nextgen hardware out of the equation you have nothing to mod and nothing to worry about. I envisage gaming in 10 years to be relative to smart phone gaming, where its either downloaded, or streamed to your TV directly. No storage, nothing to mod or hack. Just a controller that runs direct to the TV showing a live stream from a data center hive like Netflix in realtime. If you can have 255 players playing multiplayer over the internet, there is no reason that cannot be accomplished in the way I described.
