I was a video game software pirate 

I appreciate this comment a lot. I used to look at it as damaging an industry but now they do a better job at preserving what people have already bought than the companies who make the software!

@@CriticalQuack Yes, I too remember the anti-piracy propaganda back in my childhood and teenage years. Yet... From a preservation standpoint. It was and still is a necessary evil.

bbbbbbased

100%. try finding obscure amiga/atari games now that don't have a cracktro or some stamp of their origin on them. it's only because of this rampant piracy then that there's any amiga scene at all now.

I almost read that preservatives.

South Africa was not quite as blatant, but it was legit enough that pretty much every South African gamer had modchipped PS1's and PS2's that could run pirated discs

Same here in Brazil. Things would eventually start to change in middle to late 1990's.

@@eliadefilhothe taxes you guys pay on consoles is nutty

That was normal in Eastern Europe, I remember Poland and the Czech Republic. Copies were even sold in shops there. There were even counterfeit computers and consoles, I think NES was one

​@@tweakpcyep, and it was all legal since no one had the time to pass copyright law since communism fell lol That's also why witcher devs are called CD projekt - they started by selling pirated cd games, then started localising them.

+1

X-Copy III,- And V2.2(M-Pendec, “Black Hawk“ “Michael Pendec”) a Danish Programmer knew him, would write with him occasionally, but he recently passed away just a few months ago, he was an avid retro games collecter aswell, bought some of his older games too

word

@@cypenation9313 Really?

Yes ;/@@BASSstarlet

Little did you know that expectation of great things to come was just an illusion, and the 80s to early 90s was the peak. We're in full clown-world now.

Literally the BEST time to have grown up in..!!! Yes, games and computers are amazing now, but the scene isn't the same. To have been there literally at the start when arcades were the place to experience the latest and greatest, to experience each generation of new computer and console as they were evolving, and to have been part of that whole demo and pirate scene. Really cool. And that's not even mentioning movies and music :-) !!

Amen. A-goddam-men. Sadly, Alphaforce is dead on right too. It's all gone bad since the turn of the millenium.

@@alphaforce6998 today there are games being made that back in the days never could've been made like Factorio or Bannerlord. There are so many different games nowadays. Of course many are pretty samey and not very interesting and that whole dlc and gatcha crap is annoying. But if you search hard enough there will still be plenty of interesting games for everyone's taste. And the entry to game making never was that low than now (which has its pros and cons).

@@poppers7317 I don't think more equates to better, nor do I find that better visuals and sound are alone the things that make a game better. Not saying there's nothing good in the gaming world today but it's far from what it used to be. I don't get tired of playing old console emulators.

*cough* Gateway3DS *cough* SX OS

LoL, is like asking people to not download BitTorrent Pro

​@@SamuelMK_Or LimeWire Pro

That's like downloading Limewire Pro off of Limewire.

@@MonsucoI did that

I don’t think developers needs to be crossed out, it’s all true. TBH I bet you could make an argument that societally, it is actually an INVESTMENT to let children pirate, since it spurs and interest in technology.

Don't cross developers out. Witcher guys started by selling pirated cds lmao

@@michaelt5459 minecraft is a PRIME example of this

Yep, it's also worth mentioning that a surprising number of kids who pirate stuff end up actually buying it later on when they can afford it, if it was any good

@@beardalaxyIn fact, it encouraged you to pirate it first so you can buy it later

haha same story here :D

Did it make you enjoy games less? I remember spending my hard-earned cash on a game for PC back in the '80s and I would play it to death. I think if I had too many games it would strip them of their value as experiences. This same thing happened with music piracy in the '90s. Before then I'd spend what seemed like a lot of money on an album and listen to it like crazy, even finding, upon repeated plays, unexpected loves on there that I wouldn't have if I were just skimming it for hits. In my opinion there was certainly a "too much of a good thing" aspect to having free and available stuff as a kid.

@@psterud I understand you point but yes and no..i liked all the games beside the shitty ones. We dident knew what the game was about since we had no internet or anything to look at. So we dident knew if crak out was agood or bad game or if superfrog was good or bad.

@@psterud Either you can buy product X or you can get access to it via sharing. The immersion, your experience happens AFTER that. You can not compare those, you can not rewind time. This idea is highly subjective and therefore flawed. There is simply no possibility of an objective, qualitatively independent comparison. Of course there is the effect of oversaturation which you describe, as with all consumer products. Also the responsibility, i.e. the handling (media competence), lies 100% in your hands, which you can't criticize with a child. There are other factors, like social aspects of gaming and purchasing, emotional attachment to the game/characters that may be multiplied by a purchase, self expression, psychological rewards and even research or impulse-buying. Many aspects that big companies (yeah, not so big back in the days ... but "bigger" than the usual kids mental horizon or budget, hehehe) tried to "support" and did amplify with their influence on the market through press releases and advertisement. Hey, or didn't you know that smoking is the best thing for pregnant women and even the newborn kids? Yours sincerely, Doctor Marlboro. Hehehehehe:) If you are interested in such research and psychological rabbit-holes you may start reading with something like: Why Do Gamers Buy "Virtual Assets"? An Insight in to the Psychology behind Purchase Behaviour, by Cleghorn, Jack; Griffiths, Mark D. Google Scholar is your friend. Have a good one, @psterud and please enjoy your gaming!:)

Now you have the Internet and can download every C64 game ever made in one second, to play on an emulator. Sci-Fi future stuff that would have scared both you and your cousin, back then in the 80's. :)

@@zedaadega7420 "every C64 game ever made" is a really amorphous concept, which is either 'almost nothing' or 'way more than you can download in one second' and it's weird to see the subject framed like this. People already know the internet is fast. You're describing this stuff like it's 'the magical future' but it's already happened and everybody knows about it.

@@jamescarter3196 this is why you don't have any friends

That was a blast!!

@@white_mage Thank you for defending me, I don't know what the guy's problem is. You can download a 128 kb tape image in one second, and then you can instantly load it on an emulator RAM, instead of waiting 3-5 minutes. Any boy in the 1980's that had a ZX Spectrum or C64 would be in awe to imagine such a future... Now then, imagining Great Theft Auto 3 in the 1980's would truly go beyond our wildest childhood dreams... Even for the Spectrum owners that had the Turbo Esprit city driving simulator.

Imagine if Hans Zimmer got to listen to this--he'd eat his heart out. In fact, I'm strongly reminded of an episode of the CN series Teen Titans Go!, where the main cast deal with computer pirates, who surprisingly turn out to be actual (or at least, stereotypical) pirates of the seven seas. That's where piracy, both historical and digital, meet.

@@yellohammer8571 little clown

Because of "Try before you buy", guess how many (old) games I have bought from Steam, only because I pirated that game MANY years a go... A LOT! I had one rule, don't pay for pirated software, if someone should have payment it should be original creator. Also, because I was pirate ... eh, preserving history ... I do that same on Steam nowdays.. I have over 3500 games on Steam, and then some on other launches. Without pirating, I would not have that kind of archive today.

I tried to pitch the "Try Before You Buy" concept to the Unity (game engine) community but I got nowhere with it. I think trying Unity assets is even more important than trying a game. I'm developing an MMPROG game and I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars for a pack that has some clothing my characters can wear, or for a few monsters to add to my game when I don't even know if my game will come CLOSE to making it to market. I think they should receive their money when you decide to market your game. As a game asset artist, it wouldn't be hard to find your assets in a game from a publisher who didn't pay for them, and they could sue them. But if the game never sees the light of day, why do you care? Doesn't do me any good. arrghhh 😅

Thanks for Warez

That is so dope!!

That is so brilliant. Broadcasting the audio signal from tape drives....

Dude that is awesome!

Wow! That is so fucking cool!

🤯

Sounds Heavenly!

My late father worked in IBM Portugal, when I visited his office around 1985, he let me use a color terminal, in word processor mode, to draw boxes and write gibberish. I knew english as a 9 year old child, and was tempted to use the 24 PF keys (The PC has only 12 F keys) to print my boxes and drawings in an IBM office in France, Japan or the USA, I knew how to do it, because the IBM mainframe had easy help instructions in english and I was a technical nerd as a child, however I didn't want to get my dad in trouble, so I only printed my drawing to the 9th level printer room, of the portuguese IBM HQ building. What fascinated me, was that 5 years before the INTERNET came online in 1990, IBM had it's private satellite INTRANET, and my dad could send emails instantly to the american headquarters, from Portugal. This was Sci-Fi in 1985! But I saw it! :)

TBH, my assumption is, if piracy wouldn´t have been a regular thing back in those days, computers sales wouldn´t have spread as much as they did - and computers became a regular thing for everyone. The computer you wanted back then was the one for which most software existed in your "local area", because at that age and depending on the family (and own) income you didn´t have much choices, other than buying that type of computer that everyone else had around you - and get the software from there. If you had an "irregular" machine like a CPC464 for example, you were completely "lost"; because you couldn´t get your hands on any kind of software. People were often too young to be able to buy something by their own, Parents wouldn´t pay it either, Magazines for lesser known machines were locally bot available. The only Magazine you could get in my Area , at best with some additional Media like Discs or Tapes, was for the C64. The - capabilities - of the machine itself was a more or less completely uninteresting. That was something which for example the TI99/4(a) killed; because it was a totally "closed" system; it had (for that time) good specs, but virtually no software which you could get your hands on and Texas Instruments made it very complicated to develop software for it. Their slow, double interpreted BASIC was not useful at all; also they used internally and for their Cartridges ROMs that were totally different from usual ROMs (their Adress Bus was auto incrementing, TI also was the only manufacturer of them); there was - no way- to program it in Assembly without having at least an additional cartridge with extra RAM, because you even could not Peek and Poke into and onto RAM or Interfaces out of (Standard) BASIC, the Screen memory ate most of the available Memory of a stock machine etc. From a hardware point of view, it could have become a - very - strong competitor, even against 68K-Machines. But TI thought about something else, mainly gain control over the entire hardware and software market - and made a machine that should fulfill their untenable claims. The high sales from Commodore and becoming a market leader at that time were justified by their "open" Systems and mainly piracy - not because the machines were considered "good" against other machines. As said, no young buyer cared about specs back then. You wanted to play something on a TV screen; even if it would mean two tennis rackets and a flying cursor between them. Very seldom there was someone back then, who could afford buying games for $30-$50 and more; which means a - lot - of money for dozens of Games. Since kids/young people were mainly addressed by the Homecomputer manufacturers, it was clear that piracy would become the logical consequence and spread widely, because People with virtually no income couldn´t afford anything aside from the machine itself, bought by the parents or saving money for a long time. The biggest mistake was (and still is) the high price tag for Games. If this wouldn´t be the case, low sales and piracy wouldn't be an issue; but they won´t listen.

romero is a joke now i bought a game that they made recently they sold dlcs in advance, never made the dlcs. abandoned the game literally ripped people off for a game that got 3 updates off it's unplayable release state, no dlc as sold, yes sold but not delivered

@@blackoutgstar9949 romero is a legend. Period.

@@blackoutgstar9949 thats romero, thats why carmack kicked him out and daikatana was a crap game. only thing he maybe does right is Sigil, maybe hehe.

I still have zero guilt especially today where physical copies are not being sold anymore. In the US it's 100% legal to 1) record songs from the radio for personal use, 2) to view streaming movies and tv shows even if the host doesn't own the rights. Software should be no different. Digital copies that can be copied to infinity do not hurt the sales of software and do in fact many times encourage people to purchase that software. The ability to copy software is built into every PC as easy as hitting record on your tape deck. If companies don't want people to copy them, they should not release them on such systems.

There's a whole group of former software developers trying to preserve the games in their original, copy-protected form on the Amiga and C64. They have a whole website, some specialized hardware to create these disks only available via mastering, etc. The kicker? They STILL refuse to release the digital copies of the things. They just store them away somewhere, unavailable to anyone. A sure way to ensure they're all lost once again.

This happened to my pieces of music on the C-64 as well, though I never really lost them, I still have them on their original disks, but some of them which I had shared with friends made their way onto the Internet and are now available as SID's even though I never officially released them.

Another "artist", lol!

@@donaldhoot7741 Stephen Robertson was a respected artist in the c64 community at compunet. Handle: SIR. (Source: CSDB)... And, according to the very same source, Kurt Woloch was a SID artist. So, yeah, they created on the c64!

Maybe we can carefully say, piracy on short-term might not be always great, but on long-term its really good for preservation.

That's usefull in prison, maybe even a necessity 😁.

everybody did that back in the time, in every cracktro there was written a way to contact the cracker, from BBS to phone to regular mail. most of the anti-piracy laws we have today were non existant 30/40 years ago (then music and movie right holders pushed hard the politicians to do something about it, software piracy has been something written as a footnote years later, in most countries), even if you put your address in the cracktro nobody would persecute you legally, the community of gamers were small and kinda protective, seen as antisocial nerds, no cool and fashion tiktokers or twitch user with billion of revenue from game streamings would come looking for your, doxing you, etc.

They didn't have any computer laws really written back then. Many people skated because they legally couldn't charge them.

At that time it was normal.

@@jabuci Yes this was normal state of affairs until the early 2000's

How can you know he wouldn't tell if you never asked.

​@@MrK1kk3rwas just about to say that. 😅

Mine came from the cop that lived up the road from me. Used to get a stack of games from raiding the pirates that sold the games. 🤣

most probably bought at a market stall, like my father's friend did. hahaha.

My dad used to get pirate amiga games from someone at his work. So sometimes we'd be exited to see what games he'd bring us back next

You forgot to attach the gigachad image

I buy my software now but I admit I still stiff the movie industry

My grandfather was an early computer owner and his Texas Instruments TI-99 was my first intro to computers. The ROM slot had extra memory in it permanently, all the games were on tape - problem was the tapes were all copies-of-copies he'd gotten at work, and there were so many code errors it usually took 3-4 tries (at 3-4 minutes per try) to get it to load successfully. Many hours I spent blowing on the tapes as if they were dirty. "JUST LET ME PLAY PARSEC!"

@@wing0zeroidk man some of this software asking to be pirated. Like you’re switching from a purchase model to a subscription model so that I have to pay you indefinitely? I will be stealing this software my good sir 🧐

That's a lot of Macintoshes

I really thought you were going to say the video toaster. I know that was the first Amiga based one that a lot of people used to use because it could do powerful graphics for a fraction of the cost.

@@EVMANVSGAS My actual first computer was the TI99-4A. I got the Amiga next then the C64.

BBS was king. I think the ease of getting online these days is what has diluted the web. Setting up a baud modem, and knowing what BBS to connect to, were a great litmus test for keeping the Karens off the web!

I was there for that…I remember waiting for my dad to go bed so I could use his 1200 baud modem instead of my 300 and set up my overnight downloads.

Downloading 80 kilo byte Soundtracker modules from BSSs... at 231 bytes per second (2400 modem)

What happened to him?

@@ClarkPotter Benji's body was found by friends at his home. Benji's dad thought there was foul play because Benji was working on some valuable patents with ReplayTV and the work was undermining the television industry by allowing people to skip commercials. While it was true that there were likely large sums of money at play here, his dad seemed like a a pretty conspiratorial person. He had a crazy website up about Benji's death for a very long time, but I can't find it anymore. If I remember right, according to the police report, there were sex workers and drugs involved around the time of his death, but no signs of foul play. Benji's family, in particular, his dad did not like that. Understandably so. Nobody wants family to be remembered like that. The final word on Benji should've been on Quick Nibble and Roger Rabbit, not a coroner's report.

@@terminalmodehow is skipping commercials on recordings “undermining the television industry”

@@Darknesssleepsperhaps "television industry" is bad phrasing, but at the the time of Benji's death, revenue from commercials was the driving force for television productions. soap operas, talk shows etc...all designed to be filled with ads targeting specific demographics. If a device were made that would allow the majority of an audience to skip the commercials, the revenue the shows generated would also be skipped. ReplayTV was essentially an ad-blocker for a commercial television system that existed profitably for decades. Both Quick Nibble and his work on CommercialSkip put Benji among the elite of, not necessarily white hat, but at least good-for-the-community hackers. It's a far cry form what you hear many hackers do with their talents today.

@@terminalmode how would it actually skip the commercials on (what I asumme is) a VHS?

coolest mom ever!

"My mom was a software pirate" This could be a movie title

my grandma did this with vhs tapes from blockbuster lol she would rent the movies she wanted and watch it while 2 other vcr's were recording the movie she watched and then gave all her friends copys lol

@@halfpintpersonality5943 👏

@@halfpintpersonality5943 My grandfather did that with DVDs, would rent from Red-Box, Blockbuster, and mail-ins from Netflix then copy over whatever for family. We used to joke that if anyone caught on the grandkids would be burning disks on the backyard to remove the evidence.

Doszło do tego, że CDP dogadał się z zachodnimi wydawcami - sprzedajcie licencje taniej a my zrobimy lokalizację i zachodni gracz nie kupi tańszego oryginału w języku polskim.

"Gry programy gry programy windows macintosh linux"

Ciekawie było w latach 80tych z muzyka zachodnimi filmami na kasetach. Praktycznie wszystko było nielegalne kopiowane. Albo się z radia z trójki nagrywało gdzie całe płyty nadawali, albo kupowało na bazarze, czy targu. W Gdańsku w Zbrojowni (zdaje się) był Pewex ze sprzętem zachodni tam można było zamówić od sprzedawcy nagranie z kompaktu z tego wystawianego sprzętu. Co to były za ciekawe czasy.

Same can be said for Sega. Everyone says piracy killed, Sega caused it themselves

@@hanzobi1926Sega was taking a loss on every console sold due to the business model of making a profit through selling games and licences, Commodore couldn't care less what you did with your Amiga after you bought it as they already made a profit on the sale of the machine. Commodore actually benefited from piracy as the easy availability of it made the machine an attractive purchase. Segas problems were caused by not putting a dvd drive in the dreamcast and including the windows ce mil cd software in the firmware without locking it down properly. Commodores downfall was pure mismanagement and asset stripping.

commodor and atari were killed by same guy who bought them i cannot recall his name but almost directly he also almost killed the video arcade and home arcade market

btw at same time nintendo pretty much saved the market with NES

@@elfeintwentyfives1620 Jack Tramiel?, he founded commodore then left and bought Atari. I think most of Ataris problems came when his son took over and cratered their profitability. The NES market saving thing only happened in America, Here in the UK there was no video game crash and Nintendo did very poorly against Sega until the snes era. We were mainly using home micros rather than consoles due mainly to cost and availability of cheap or pirated software. If you had a console it was a master system and very much a secondary gaming device to whatever micro you had. I never used a nes until emulation was a thing and tbh im not surprised it bombed here, for the price of the drab looking games it really wasn't an attractive option. It probably didnt help that nintendo completely botched the launch and the games offered were sometimes years old.

Sorry for your loss, dads are the best and always remember the great times you had together as it eases the pain

ZX Spectrum for me. I´ve been a filthy pirate for 40 years!

@@_marlene Growing up in Alaska we had Apple II computers in our Kindergarten class in the late 70s and by 3rd grade they built a computer lab, but the free to use computers were in the library

I just used to use scissors!

My first school computer was an Apple II in 1990. All we used with it was Oregon Trail and Number Munchers. By the end of elementary we had Macintosh LCs. Thankfully for me in high school we had PCs which I knew and internet. The site blocking was pretty bad, we downloaded NES emulators and ROMs. The only kid I knew that that got in trouble was downloading Playboys.

My school decided the way to 'stop piracy' was to ban students from using disks with a round notch. Someone had told our Principal that it was the 'round notch' that made things copyable. Our lab monitor knew it was stupid, but enforced the policy. He also made square hole punches in the metal shop for us. He put an edge guide on it so you wouldn't have to line up two disks to get the notch in the right spot. I still have mine. Eventually they banned using Nibble-Bit (??) in the computer lab. A friend of mine rewrote the program and changed the opening screen and made it look like some kind of mining game while it was doing the actual copying. About the only thing I miss from High School.

We had a purpose built puncher for making perfect square punches!!! See my comment above about going to my friend James' house for software.

just like mvg then 😂

The annoying thing was copy protection hammering your floppy drive - even putting it's head out as it wrote errors on the edges - not sure their were any unbroken games - I broke my first few - then had a friend do it - as he loved doing it - more than playing - we were in NZ - so imagine every country had people removing it - Well in Europe a broken one could spread fast I suppose

Hah well nowadays anyway.

I subscribe a 100% to that idea, Granny! But meant are commercial products with f.e. the availability of spare parts only for selected, undemocratically determined groups of people, or not at all, to ... again ... undemocratically support a monopolist or cartel structures. Subscriptions and leasing models are really nothing new and do not claim to create a customer-side ownership relationship, but a payment for the usage of the product. This is not inherently a bad thing, but on the contrary, it also allows poorer people, and especially those in developing countries, access that they would otherwise not have. Abuse is of course possible and there must be regulations so that, for example, a tendency towards the creation of supremacy and abuse by corporations is prevented. If you mean software subscriptions, the consumer is 100% at fault here (Yeah "fault" ... let's better use "responsibility")! DON'T -BUY- LEAN THAT EFFING ADOBE OR MICROCRAP SUBSCRIPTION BS! ... hehehe, it is as easy like that! "But my local government/employer/hospital/etc. uses cloud 360 BS ....", then vote for someone else, put pressure on those responsible or boycott them. Money is a language they understand. In those cases, piracy is no solution but like a bad medicine, a botched workaround. Piracy doesn't support Open Source products and developers, which should be THE free and accessible ALTERNATIVE to closed and payed/leased big company software. This lies in the full responsibility of the customers and is easily possible to enforce that. Well, if there wasn't stupidity, laziness, corruption and greed ... :)

:)))

"Piracy on the Amiga was so bad, I didn't even know people actually had to buy games at the store." I love this lol

Piracy harms consumers as well as legitimate developers. Did you not read those PS1 green text screens MVG! ( ͡ಠ ʖ̯ ͡ಠ)

So THAT'S why Amiga games have box art. For the people who didnt pirate stuff

😂😂😂

such a beautiful dream of a memory. I envy you. Glad that things like this existed

People forget that floppy disks were notoriously unreliable and could wipe themselves for no reason other than bad luck.

@@cattysplat This and does anyone else remember the SCA Virus on the Amiga? If you had a copy protected disk that relied on the boot sector, that would get modified by the virus, destroying your game. Ask me how I know... 🙄🙄

Ironic when the disk was copy protected. And, herein lies the _legal_ argument for cracking: to make a usable backup copy of your legally purchased software.

My original amiga floppies (and copies) are still fine 30 years later having been stored in my attic and subjected to unbearable heat all summer to minus temperatures through the winter for the last 20 or so years. Actually the amiga it's self still soldiers on too. Don't think I ever remember a floppy crapping out. I have had to clean a few though which always made me cringe... So in my experience floppies are fine and don't "degenerate" even in extreme temperatures

I'll have to go back and check, but I do recall some games that did indeed asked you to make a copy of the game disks before playing and to use the copies to play off, thus preserving the original. I think Ultima III was one such game.

Oh yes. Have one too. With XBMC it was so long my preferred "HTPC" machine 🙂

I have a chipped Xbox too with a case full of discs. My favourite function is being able to switch off 50Hz PAL mode and run everything at full speed. Mine needs a new DVD ROM, I might put in an SSD just to make it quiet and do the caps while I'm there.

even the 2000s, really - just stacks and stacks of CDs and DVDs, until harddrives got cheap. now it's the age of the NAS

It was same behind Iron Curtain, just delayed. I got used ZX Spectrum clone in late 80s with stack of tapes. Same with C64 after revolution. With exception i was not able to read english which means i could not play some games or use tools.

Indeed.

@@ZeDestructor00 Yes. The 2000s were in fact even "wilder" because everybody went online and used EMule to share and download stuff. In the second half of the 2000s one-click-hosters like Rapidshare were the place to go.

Same here...! Although I also remember the horror when your disk collection got infected through a bootsector corruption....! It was the first time we heard the term VIRUS....

😂 aarrrrrrrrrrrrr 🏴‍☠

LoL! I remember that one.. I had a backup of it..

I wish I could afford an Amiga with a disk drive... I only had a Spectrum with a cassette player. Because the game data was on a sound tape, I could pirate all I wanted with a stereo, but still I would trade my 500 spectrum games for 20 amiga disk games. Later I had a 486 DX4 PC, but I was older and the magic was gone...

What are you doing these days?

Yea I hear what your saying back in the 80's I had no money being a school kid and all that 🥸. So yea I had hundred's of full C90's full of spectrum and C64 games and even as I got older I had lots of copied PC games. I think I changed when the original playstation came out. I could get copy games but I honestly never did as I enjoyed that system so much and have been a sony fan boy ever since. I do enjoy emulation and now have a vast libary of ps1 and ps2 games etc on my pc even tho I do subscribe to sony premium so they still get my money and I still buy any new games that I like the look of and won't dream of getting a pirate copy. But if ya young at school or in college then hell yea, you have enough money worries in life plus it's educational getting around the copy protection🤣. If school kids pirate for other school kids I personally think the industry just has to except that. Where I draw the line is adults selling hhd drives on ebay and alibaba etc full of not to old games that is wrong

What was the game?

@@christophclear1438 pimania

@@christophclear1438 I guess Blobz? :)

@@Thornado78 solid detective work! 🙂

I only knew simple programming when I contributed to the MAME/RAINE emulators, only to emulate the analog controls, but when the people found out, they started to ask me to add custom control options for light guns, custom cabinets, with only one pedal for a driving game ("Hey Mr. Warlock! Can you add a fake DIP switch option, so that my only pedal acts as an accelerator from half way pressed, and a brake with lower pressure!?" I said: Sure! It's done, here is the code for use with the emulator compilation tool"). I felt flattered...

xcopy was the real game 😅

Not to mention it was nigh-impossible to find an original PS1 game owner around here, some years down the road

@@anibalmax1981 once I was told the original PS1 cds were black! Can you imagine a black cd? Until I saw an original one years later and they were actually coated black!

Yep, in fact the only original softwares I can remember were boxes of Symantec anti-virus and internet connection dial-up AOL or Netizen, I still have the box from a DSL vendor called Synectis main office on "Lavalle" and "Florida". Was late on the party of cassettes, but I sure got a kick of it from floppies and CDs. One of my first pirated CDs was Total Annihilation, you can copy the game but you won't have music just like Quake 2.

Mistakes were made. There was no way 16-bit games truly needed to cost the price they did. Double an 8-bit game price perhaps, but they were triple the cost. I still remember seeing Mortal Kombat for the consoles in shops in the early 1990s. £40 for a game when £40 was a lot of money, £82 now which is more than a PS5 game costs.

He became a video game software pirate: Mistakes weren’t made.

Yeah sometimes when burning discs, the data loses some integrity. So you get weird colors and visual glitches and messed up audio

Well, in the early Spyro games for the PS1, if you pirated the game, the character of Zoe will inform you that the game is cracked, and will not provide you with mission details, which lets you start the levels. There are also less gems to collect, and I believe that gliding becomes harder.

@@zaidabraham7310 less to do with the quality of the CD-R and more to do with how buggy the crack was. my brother couldn't complete the game and just told me what Is said in the comment lol. we didn't know any better then.

@momcody PS1 games didn't have to be cracked. The DRM was hardware-based. So with a modchipped console you could just rip a licensed disc, then burn the image onto a blank disc and the console would run it no problem

Me too. I wonder if we ever met?

Amazing story!

Sounds a lot like my own story... Met a fellow amigan with a love of games and gfx and, through many a year and wonderful adventures we eventually ended with him as lead 3D artist in some studios and me as software developer in some software houses. But,if not for AMOS The Creator and Blitz Basic, dumping primitive 3D from Imagine2 straight to SVHS with the help of ClariSSA, getting a 2nd hand VLAB Motion, a shabby 2GB HD that was fast enough and a Lightwave copy of "dubious origin" and hundreds of hours scrapping the old "warez" site for "stuff that looks interesting" we probably wouldn't have stayed in the game long enough to finally make it.

@@ErazerPT The days when knowing how to render sphere would get you a gig ! 😂

@@frankaalbers1099 For real. Another friend went on to become a VJ. Started with an Amiga using Scala, a mix of hand-draw DPaint short anims, short clips captured from VHS with a trash digitizer and stop-motion with a shabby digital camera. IMHO, it's something people now don't have as much in their "toolbox", ie, thinking of ways to use something only slightly related that they have available to get some result. You get really "creative" when resources are limited 🤣 Some people still remember when i saved the day with WinMorph. The original DV footage had some frames corrupted at a critical spot, too trashed to even just "Photoshop it" a bit. So i got the clip, took it to frames and just morphed frame to frame over the corrupted ones. You could see it if you knew what to look for, but overall it was too smooth/fast to register for real, unlike the artifacts from corruption. Miss those days. There's an inherent charm to the insane vibe of "experimentation, because that's mostly what we have to work with".

@@ErazerPT the first USD million dollar is the toughest to stash !

The Amiga and Lightwave was way ahead of its time. I miss my Amiga

Burnout on OG Xbox for me. Even tho I’m a Nintendo / Sony guy now

Tape is still used to this day on enterprise backups.

damn you a youngsta

@@ZeroUm_ yup. when I was doing IT stuff fro one of my old jobs, we used tapes. it was pretty fun

It was perfectly normal back then. Fast loading games were the realm of expensive cartridge machines like the NES and Master System, which few people had in the 80s, in the UK. It was predominantly 8-bit micros with tape drives, or portable cassette decks for game loading.

I had Ghostbusters a year before the movie released, track 'n' field years before they decided to release it in the UK. I'm convinced the coders were just handing them out to their mates left right and centre, they were probably just so proud of what they had created.

When certain games like flight sims/etc. used most of the keyboard - how was anyone supposed to 'learn/remember' that? So they had amazing manuals and 'keyboard overlays' as well as other reference material you placed at your fingertips. Pause the game and look it up right there instead of needing to open it on the same computer being used to game... The internet helped gaming companies get greedy through 'savings' on materials - thus began the downward spiral associated with all gaming corporations today.

I had the M3 and taught myself how to pirate and add more games to it. It was kinda shitty, but it also had a media player so I could play MP3s and heavily compressed video files on it. Nowadays you can softmod a DSi or 3DS, install Twilight Menu and run DS cards off the SD card. No R4 or other flash carts required.

I used my R4 to play homebrew games like Lemmings and make music with NitroTracker. It has less limitations than WarioWare DIY

Or scurvy, that was the worst part of being a pirate.

​@@CyanRooperWith all the Mountain Dew drinking, I can imagine.

Yargh!

Will always appreciate the time that one guy who did all the copying put in to make sure everyone got their copy. You have to be an enthusiast to essentially run a copying service for free on your own time.

There are probably dozens of videos covering the techniques, tape drive, Disk techniques, cartridge techniques, dongles, crazy password systems (those wheel things), even simple color transparent overlays and cardboard glasses (like 3d glasses) that you had to use to look at codes printed on the screen of the computer.

@@warp9988 Yes & very few go into the details of disk-based techniques outside of Rob Smith's video which actually talks about some of the more ingenius copy protections of the 80s beyond simple CRC errors like 'weak bit', 'track 41', 'Prolok', & 'Softguard' . And I explicitly said "other than feelies & dongles" in my comment because those aren't very clever & easy to defeat.

Source Code 88

I used to go to a computer tutor for my Amiga 500, I pretty much just spent every lesson just copying his game collection 😂

haha now i know from where those discs came from. I saw Flynn from Tristar working on these on my Amiga 1000, but he never told me where they came from :D

Wow, I had an Amiga 500 and later a 1200, and the RSI Cebit demo was a standard song I played on a daily basis!! Cool to see people from that scene after all these years... lol

I was too young back then to be in the scene, but i always found those "lamer" messages funny on disks, kinda like 1 scene group trolling another scene group. eventually when i got older and more into tracker music software. i met some sceners briefly on regular retro meetings. 1 from Paradox etc.

I went from TRS-80 to ZX80 to BBC Microcomputer to ZX Spectrum to C64 to Amiga 1000 / 500 and then it went to consoles. I stopped playing after the PS2 and never really got back into it in a serious way since.

@@clarkkent4734 i was so sad when i had to sell my A500 to buy a (massively inferior) PC to get through uni. But on the bright side cracking PC software was a total breeze after all that assembler experience 😀 i now work in IT Security for enterprise companies, totally transferable skills.

In the late 90s and early 2010s, you could only realistically get original games if you had family in the US that traveled back and forth between the two countries, since only NTSC-U games were compatible here. Real ones also remember that internet cafes also had ps2s and gamecubes back in the day that you could rent.

Here in Chile is technically illegal, but you can still buy pirated disc on the streets.

@@leiburjorge8443 "Always has been" (Astronaut meme)

Pirated games for both the PS1 and PS2 were the norm here in Latin America (I'm from Brazil), so much so that even rich families bought pirated games for their kids.

@@DetoCerqueira "One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue..." -Gabe Newell