What was software piracy like in the 90s?
>>107256303it was like my balls in your mouth.
>>107256303If you don't know how to disk swap then get out of my face
>>107256303Nobody knew anyone who had a chipped consoleEveryone and their dad pirated everything on said dad's computer though
>>107256303in russia it was easier to buy something pirated than ledgit.and it continued to at least 2010.it is still alive in some form but it is just easy to buy the things you need.as a bonus the prices for Russia are still super cheap on anything including games. It is 2-4 times cheaper than it is for you because pirates should be rewarded for their ways.
>>107256303Game stores look something like this here under the sea.
>>107256303it was kino, my friend knew how to copy ps1 disks, so we borrowed from blockbuster and ripped them for keeps.
>>107256471was not there some proprietary protection on the edges of the disk that you won't be able to copy without special equipment?
there was a cool internet cafe in my town. you could ask the guy running it for any game, he'd find it and burn it onto a CD for you. this was in the mid 2000s so I don't really know about the state of P2P file sharing at the time. he could somehow find the obscurest shit too. they had custom installers and all, often included small bonus games on the CD.
>>107256490i dunno, think it was before they started doing that. All i remember was that the ps1 copy discs were black.
why is there AI slop in EVERY FUCKING THREAD
>>107256490not him, but yes, the playstation has copy protection, two kinds that i know of. one is a deliberate "wobble" the lead-in area, the wobble is deliberately encoded region information the psx cd hardware can detect to tell if it's a real psx disc. you can't read nor write this wobble in a cd burner.the other kind is libcrypt, which uses deliberate apparently-corrupted subchannel information to detect poor copies, as most disc copying software will fix or even not read subchannel datacopying them was easy, any cd drive could read and write them, just without the wobble. and you can copy libcrypt discs if you use appropriate burning software.playing them was done either with a modchipped console or via a swaptrick>>107256573i swear there used to be special cd-r's you could get with the security wobble pressed into them (illegal), but i've never seen one. probably not worth it over a modchip unless you're trying to sell bootlegs
>>107256601idk what the point is, either. does he think we can't tell?
>older brother and cousin knew some bbs where you could download games>took all night with the phone in use, hoping noone in the family needs to use it>random floppies of something popular with paper sticker residue and dune2000 written in pencil on it were passed around school maybe idk how they came to be>demo disk was your goto entertainment really for ease of access
>>107256303Here we rented CDs from rentals, anything from MP3s, Programs, Anime, even images like JPEG.Or just bring your 4.3GB HDD to Internet Cafes, copying anything they have downloaded from midnight to dawn as they closed in morning. You can play your PS CDs with Bleem!
>>107256303well the c64 used cassette tapes, and pretty much everybody either had, or knew somebody with; a double cassette deck stereo, so copying tapes was piss easy
>>107256303i miss ripped dreamcast games
>>107256626thank you fren.it is super interesting - never heard about it.
>>107256642its teenagers ragebaiting, they think they are funny
>>107256658the security wobble is pretty interesting technically. as i understand it, in normal cd readers the laser is mounted on a few electromagnets which allow it to follow the track of data on the cd even if it's not perfectly balanced or centered (cd tech by itself is pretty amazing). what i believe the security wobble does is it modulates part of the cd's track itself, causing the laser to have to wobble back and forth in a particular pattern to keep it in focus, which the drive controller can pick up on. this requires a custom cd drive controller to even read it, which isn't an issue for sony since they make cd drives (actually they co-developed the cd format)
>>107256658i think there were one or two cd-based consoles with no protection, like the sega cd i don't think has any. sound dumb but that was back before consumer cd burners were a thing so they might not have anticipated people would be able to make their own cd's for any worthwhile cost
>>107256312And then he bites down hard and turns you into a "woman"?
>>107256587I'm genuinely fascinated by just how terrible this bot is at pretending to be a 4chan poster
>>107256829why do trump supporters think about girl cock 24/7
>>107256389I had a chipped one, we went to blockbuster, rented the games, and then copied them
i pirated some things on pc. my friend had a modded ps1 that could play burned games.
>>107256303it was kinda shit
i really wanted a gameboy flash cart but didn't know where to get them from
>>107256941They knew they were voting for a gravy swallower the whole time. Clintons balls literally slapped his chin.
>>107256303a friend of mine had something similar to this, he was pretty cool
>ask a question>clearly know the answer(You)
>>107256303I don't pirate software anymore, but it was pretty cool. You would have key generators with chip tune music, And nifty little programs that would patch the executables of installed programs to accept specific generated keys.
split archives, rar recovery records and par files were common because internet connections were far less reliable than they are nowadays, and bittorrent hadn't been invented yet which fixed that
>>107258331also sharing stuff via lans (lanparties) and physical media (sneakernet) was still king as far as total data transferred is concerned, like even into the '00s i was still getting and giving big stuff like new games, movies, and anime by just visiting friends with my computer or lending/borrowing external hdd's
>>107258363(not so much /video/ in the '90s though, except a bit at the very end, computers didn't have the power for good quality video nor the storage space to store much video, either, at most maybe you'd be making vcd's or something)
It was a great money maker but I was kept away from computers because I would have left the country. It should be free anyway. Pay for stuff occasionally but pirate some stuff. I need access to things that I cannot get through official channels so have to resort to piracy.
searching "warez"taking like 2 hours to download 100mb gameturns out it was just shareware or somethingthinking warez was pronounced 'juarez' because you're 12
>>107258378-- even into the '00s my pirated video collection was stacks of dvd-r's, hdd's just weren't big enough yet, like a stack of 100 dvd-r's might cost $50 or something, and store 438GiB of data, while my 80GB hdd cost $200, so it made sense still to keep media on discs
>90sNo idea, but I remember what it was like in the 2000s. People would visit each other just to exchange discs with pirated movies, shows, games and all kinds of useful programs. My cousin had like ten of these disc holders (https://files.catbox.moe/xdvzxk.jpeg) full of pirated stuff, and he'd lend them to me, so I could copy it onto my own PC. They even sold pirated discs here openly at malls and such. And they still do, kek. I took this pic (https://files.catbox.moe/knr8t7.png) the other day at a mall. Pretty much how it was in the 2000s. But back then they also sold discs with pirated shit in fancy jewel boxes and there were way more of these kinds of stores.
>>107258405i really got into it when a friend introduced me to anime. there was just no other way to get it, stores didn't sell anime unless it was one of the handful of localised kids' anime that also played on tv. fansubs were the only way you could see most anime
>>107258302warez! god that was fun times.
>>107256312>it was like my balls in your mouth.That's honestly it. The internet was so unchecked in the 90's that software piracy was a big nothing. The only downside was dealing with a 56K modem if you weren't an early adopter of cable internet. This was before wifi. Then of course Napster launched in 1999, and by the early 2000's piracy was as easy as downloading a P2P client. Yeah, Napster was attacked heavily by Lars Ulrich of Metallica and the music industry. It was the 'easy mode' way to download thousands of MP3 files. But Napster lead the way to Limewire, Kazaa and all sorts of other P2P networks that allowed for all sorts of file sharing. Games, software, videos, music. I suppose IRC/ MIRC was also a way to pirate too. This led into torrents.
>>107258693do you like my balls in your bot mouth.
>yfw first burners with Buffer-Underrun Protection were available
>>107258808>do you like my balls in your bot mouth.I'm not a bot... I'm literally in my 40's and was an early internet pirate. I use to pirate half of my software online;.
>>107256701Most likely reader knows when some bytes are going to be broken and expects this. If they are not broken this will trigger the copy protection. This is how copy protected floppies worked, some companies used pre-marked (scratched) 3.5" floppies. Cdrom/dvd works the same way- if data in specific places is borked and the reader knows to expect this.By reader I mean the routine what reads the data.
>>107256303We lived at a college and my dad would get pirated amiga and pc games from the computer nerds. I would burn copies of my games for my friends too. It was pretty neat.
>>107258842yes, exactly, there were several copy protection schemes that used deliberately corrupt data to detect a copy, stuff that typical reading/burning software will "fix" automatically.securom for example works the same way, the original disc is bad on purpose so when you make a "fixed" copy, the software can see that the "bad" part isn't there and know it's not the original disc
>>107258832Do you not remember the teabagging era of piracy?
>>107258894>Do you not remember the teabagging era of piracy?Oh man, do I ever....
>>107258889I set up bunch of Microprose games (M1 Tank Platoon etc) for Dosbox and was reading their manuals. Some game manual/tech help sheet mentioned this but don't really remember which one it was. I wish physical media would return.
>>107256303software piracy: late 90s internet was slow so it was friend to friend borrowing CDs and copying them on your own... also some friends managed to get some pirate group CDs where there were many games on one CD..movie/music piracy was:just borrow it from the music CD/video DVD store for literally pennies, copy it on your own CD/DVD... return the borrowed music/video back
>>107258842>>107258889also this is in relation to libcrypt (>>107256626). the wobble is something else, unique as far as i know. the wobble isn't bad data, it's a deliberately wobbly physical track. like instead of a perfect spiral like a normal cd track, there's a wobbly/modulated part that encodes the console region the disc is for (and by extension, the fact it's a real psx disc)you can see here for example;https://youtu.be/bi7xkaHito4how the laser assembly gyrates with the disc, following the motion/physical position of the track as discs are never perfectly balanced
>>107256389I had a chipped ps1, and even chipped it myself. I did burn my thumb on the soldering iron though.
ausfag heregrew up with a ps1 that was modded to play pirated gamesonce went to bali with family and came home with a small satchel containing dozens of burnt ps1 gamesgood times.
>>107258957i was cheap as fuck, so i just mastered the double swaptrick
>>107258970Nice, I was not very good at that
>>107256303CD-R's were barely a thing back then. You had to be rich to afford the burners. Download speeds were ass and warez sites didn't have as many games as you think. Usually those sorts of games were sourced from flea markets or from a friend who knew a guy who knew a guy.
>>107258988i got probably most of my playstation games early on from renting them and making copies, or copying friends' discs
>>107258988>>107259010-- like; as you mentioned, actually downloading them was almost out of the question. a full cd worth of data would take literally days to download
-I could go to a computer store with a playstation, ask for a chip install and be told to come back in an hour-Piratefags who owned a CD burner could make a lot of money because people would actually pay for a CD-R- Pirating in Europe gave you a sense of superiority because it meant you had access to superior NTSC-US/JP versions running at 60hz without borders. And we did not know about the oscillator issue, so there was bliss in ignorance.Not everything was good, though.- Ripped PC games without music or cutscenes, since Pirate compilations were the most common distribution format.- pirate burned CD-R sellers got greedy and started switching from Verbatim to Princo while charging the same. Recording quality went downhill over time, so unless you bought your own burner, you needed to know a pirate that could be trusted to not fuck up.
>>107256312Non existent?
>>107256303For me it was all PC. Copies of games on floppies from friends / acquaintances, later on the same but on CDs. I'd learn about a cool game from a magazine or something but would have no way of getting it, until I heard that a friend or a friend of a friend had the game and I'd ask for it. Then I'd have to hope that the guy wasn't an asshole and would share it, that he'd trust me with his CD (to not scratch it), when I got it I'd have to hope his CD wasn't already scratched or something and if it all worked I would try to make a copy. Getting a CD writer was a major milestone.The internet / LAN cafes around town also pirated heavily themselves and you could go there and pay them to put a bunch of pirated games on a CD for you. This was all before internet at home was common. I still remember when my dad bought the first such CD for me when I was a little kid in the late 90s, it had a bunch of super cool shit on it like Starcraft, Red Alert, Rollercoaster Tycoon and I think Caesar III as well. I might still have this very CD somewhere.This lived on into the 2000s and a large part of the game & software sharing started happening on burned DVDs instead, until fast internet eventually took over. Once that happened the first file sharing program of choice was DC / DC++ on the fucking ISP's own local DC server, then it all switched to torrents eventually. I remember getting the first internet connection which could download stuff at over 1MB/s, no bandwidth limit, no tying up the phone line, no extra fees depending on how long you used it for, it felt absolutely magical after only getting like 2-4KB/s or something like that on dialup.
>>107259042>-I could go to a computer store with a playstation, ask for a chip install and be told to come back in an hourthere are some benefits to being in a third world country>-Piratefags who owned a CD burner could make a lot of money because people would actually pay for a CD-Ri remember as a kid my very first cd-r. my neighbour who just moved in was basically who i am now, a full on computer geek. not sure what he did for a living, but his room/office was just full of tech. one time i brought over a bunch of cd's and floppies and got him to burn a cd-r with all kinds of stuff on it. he wasn't impressed i only had $5 for his time, but it's really on him since i was like 8 years old or something. i didn't bring that disc with me when i moved so who knows where it is now. i only remember it had a copy of windows 95 and abuse (the dos game) on it. there was more on there but i don't remember.
Good old times. I remember those dodgy markets with pallets of stuff under cellophane from the rain. First there were VHS, then NES and Genesis knock offs, a ton of PC software and games, PS1 games, and after all that DVDs. I don't think that in all my childhood I've ever seen a real PS1 or a Dreamcast game. It was fun to browse through stuff, looking at covers and reading poorly translated annotations. Fast internet killed all of that. I still used pirated stuff, but I burnt XBOX 360 games myself
>>107256303More physical media sharing, floppies and discs, compared to downloading from P2P programs, web/FTP or BBSes, etc.
>be me, 12>deliver newspapers for cash money>browse newspaper classified advertisments>find local dude that mods playstations>ride bike over>notice he works at local radioshack>ride home with chipped ps1>browse newspaper classified advertisments>find local dude that sells ps1 games for $2>ride bike over>bunch of stoners with a cd burner>ride home with gamesthat week i decided i would never pay full price for digital content ever again
>>107259352fuck i should have paid more attention to the classifieds as a kid
>>107259352>>107260181my dad always had a newspaper, but i don't remember looking at them much. i only used the outdated stack of them as firestarters for the water heater... lol
>>107259215>there are some benefits to being in a third world countryI wish this was South America, in terms of what I have heard about piracy. Unfortunately, this was Europe, and by 1998 or 1999 the crackdown came into full force. Chip installers went underground just as the PS2 was near its release, and there was no way of knowing which one could be trusted. lots of soldering disasters and badly flashed modchips.>i only remember it had a copy of windows 95 and abuse (the dos game) on it. there was more on there but i don't remember.I still remember pretty well that first pirate cd and its contents:- Windows 95- Plus for W95- Microsoft Money- Borland C++ Suite- Final Quake leaked Beta- Heretic and hexen- The Lion King- Transport Tycoon- EarthWorm Jim Special Edition- PitfallGames like Heretic would keep the read only attribute when copied from the CD to the HDD, so I would not be able to overwrite the save files until I learned to edit said attributes. In the end, I was able to learn some stuff from the experience.
>>107260255>I still remember pretty well that first pirate cd and its contents:i wonder how well remembering your first cd-r works as a litmus test for someone who was actually around in the '90s, like if someone made one much later it wouldn't have been nearly as big a deal as to remember specifically when you made it or what you put on it. cd's were around for some time before you could make your own, and it was a pretty big deal
>>107256303Your friend had a game you wanted. He probably got it from a friend of a friend. You brought a bunch of 1.44 MB diskettes and packed the game onto them with a rar command. Then you brought the diskettes home and had to remember the appropriate rar command for unpacking the contents of the diskettes into a directory on your hard drive. The process involved a lot of diskette swapping, depending on the size of the game.By the end of the 90s CD burning started to become a thing, so you wouldn't have to deal with all the diskettes. Then you had to become friend with that guy with rich parents who could afford a CD burner, and writable CDs weren't entirely cheap.
>>107256303this killed your dreamcast laser
I DON'T KNOW ABOUT SOFTWAREBUT EVERYONE HAD PIRATED CABLE TVEVERYONEEVEN THE REVEREND I DON'T KNOW HOW THE CABLE COMPANIES MADE MONEY
>>107260414cable companies made money on sports packages. too much of a hassle to pirate those live.
>>107260404my dreamcast laser still works :)
>>107260620not for long. those capacitors were made during the plague. even if the laser still works, it will probably get reset of death.
>>107260414as someone who isn't american, i've heard enough about american cable to be curious, but not enough to know what the deal isit's like you heard "it's expensive", "nobody wants to pay for it", but "everyone has it" and "there hundreds(really?) of channels", but "it's all garbage" and so on and so forth. anyone got a youtube video overviewing it? i'd be interested in setting all this straight
>>107260340The CD was a copy of the one a friend of my dad had, so It probably identifies him more than me.>Offtopic:There may be saved heretic multiplayer recorded demos inside and I have been saying I'm going to make an ISO of it for years. Maybe this weekend I'll get to it since I finally bought an external DVD drive.While I was there in the late 90s, I never had access to the latest stuff. All I had in 1997 was a CD with 130 dos games compressed in ARJ, so while people were playing C&C Red Alert, I was playing Monkey Island II and One Must Fall 2097. For newer stuff you had to wait until a pirate compilation disc moved around long enough that a copy reached one of your friends, So I would not be able to play Blood and Redneck Rampage until 1999.I started burning my old compilations of stuff around 2001, made of whatever I could get my hands whenever I had access to a public internet computer without an HTTP blocking proxy. Short funny videos of monkeys, a few porn pics here and there, flash movies and games, h-games, rpg maker crap, downloaded web pages, more porn... Last time I tried to open it, Windows Defender would throw a fit about every "fun" program like the one that keeps opening the CD tray, the fake format C: prank or the "throbber" dick generator being all malware.
>>107260638I guess it was similar to when we had Satellite Premium TV. 50 channels, 10 or 20 were international public or news channels, The first week you thought there was a ton, but channels like Showtime had a few films and series that would be played multiple times each month, so once you had watched enough you had to wait for the next release. And the add-on packages like Disney or Sports were almost as expensive as the base subscriptionNowadays I think it has evolved into ISPs bundling Premium TV packages, which may also include streaming services.
>>107260807it just felt so different to what i was used to. i didn't have pay tv growing up, just the free to air ones, a whole 3 channels, later (in the '90s) 4.the idea of dozens of channels blew my mind
>>107260908>a whole 3 channelsI remember the end of the monopoly TV era. We went from 2 channels (4 if you lived in a place with regional channels) to 5 channels, one of them being a mix of free and premium content (scrambled).It may look like a ton of channels, but most of them were filler. Music channels (we had VH1 but not MTV), cooking, documentaries, but nothing like HBO, sadly. One thing for sure: There was no advertising, and no breaks during movies and shows.I ended researching a bit about the American situation. Looks like in the old times (I guess like in that Simpsons episode) nothing was encrypted and stealing cable was as easy as hooking to the line and getting a generic cable top box.Here pirating was a bit harder:- Getting a TV tuner card and using software to descramble TV. Before that, many of us attempted to masturbate to scrambled porn.- With Satellite TV, replacing the official card with a programmable one. Once every several weeks or months they would change the codes and you needed to get somebody to update the card for you again. In the end they were changing codes so often that it was not worth the effort. This would last until 2001-2002, when DSL got cheap enough that everybody would simply download stuff over emule.
>>107261136>- Getting a TV tuner card and using software to descramble TV. Before that, many of us attempted to masturbate to scrambled porn.i tried that once, there were a few scrambled pay tv channels on UHF through the '90s.they were VideoCrypt-encoded (PAL) and the audio was unmodified (so i could be teased that nickelodeon was right there but i wasn't allowed to watch it). at one point briefly i picked up a bt848/878 card and tried one of those decryption programs, but my machines just weren't fast enough so i gave up on it
>>107261136>>107261265also-- was your scrambled tv really almost legible like that? videocrypt certainly wasn't. you could tell when there's a scene change, and get a feel for what kind of movement was happening, but otherwise you really couldn't make anything out
>>107261265>bt848/878Blast from the past, damn. Do you remember your computer's specs? I probably had a 1.66ghz AMD CPU and 256mb RAM by then, and I barely could get the Nagravision decoding software to work. I was never sure if it was a software problem, or I was underpowered.>>107261396While scrambled, you could clearly recognise some parts, specially during close ups or soccer matcheshttps://youtu.be/2W0JsCbkk60https://youtu.be/h1zGBkm_obYThere was a bit of a delay between the program start and the scrambling kicking in, so you would be able to see the transition mid-scene.
>>107260807I was using softcams on dreambox until halfway 2000's. Only when seca2 encryption was released the party was over.
>>107261483>Do you remember your computer's specs?i tried to set this up on a secondary computer, something i could set up on a loungeroom tv so my dad could watch live sports. i didn't have an aerial socket in my room of course so i couldn't use it there, and while the lounge tv and family computer were in different rooms, they happened to be right next to each other with only a partial wall dividing them, but who wants to watch tv on a 17" monitor? (even then when the tv was like 28" or something, i'm actually not sure how big our late '90s tv was precisely, our early '90s tv i barely remember, that was probably closer to 20", crazy small by todays standards)the computer i tried it on... i don't remember exactly what it was, probably on the order of 400-500MHz, it was less than our first family computer which was 667MHz i know that. and yes i did try quarter resolution and all that, it just took too long between code changes to be comfortable to watch. as you well know technology moved real fast back then and i'm sure if i tried it a few years later it'd be a piece of cake, but in the '90s, computers became hopelessly outdated year over year>clipsit's interesting how your video is close to legible, but your audio is messed up, i wonder what they did to the audiohere's what videocrypt looks like in motion;https://youtu.be/3MHAFLKYSjo(i'm not from UK, but same system)as you can see, audio is normal, but the video is really quite unrecognisable, not /completely/ random, it's still just shuffled lines, but not something you'd want to watch for more than a few seconds
>>107261483>>107261638>while the lounge tv and family computer were in different rooms, they happened to be right next to each other with only a partial wall dividing them, but who wants to watch tv on a 17" monitor?realised this part doesn't really make sense. had a bit to drink.i believe by this point the original family computer had become my computer (i was the only one in my family into computers) and so the family computer at that point was something something weaker. the way i wrote that contradicts itself so i apologise
heh here in my shitworld country (south america) you could get already chipped ps1/ps2 with warranty even, good imes
>>107261483oh and yes, i am aware that the fact you mention a 1.66GHz amd cpu means you're not talking about the '90s strictly, but whatever, i don't care that much, anything H1 '00s is just extended '90s lets be honest
>>107261638found the source of that audio if anyone careshttps://youtu.be/cL0NXKprKnQ
You could get CDs with chinese characters on them and volume names like KING_SOFTWARE_VOL_4 with like 50 programs and text files of serial numbers on them
>>107256303you would download britneyspearshitmebabyonemoretime.avi and it would be child porn. Then youd downloand britneyspearshitmebabyonemoretime.mp3.exe and it would be a virus. Then you would delete both of them and try again only for your mom to tell you to get off the internet because she needs to make a phone call and you'd stop caring about trying to get some shitty pop music for free and just go outside and hang out with your friends because there werent nonwhites walking around, murdering and raping people yet so it was safe for kids to just wander around all day.
>>107262934>spear shit>hit meI don't think it's either but I may be misremembering
>>107261960>CDs with chinese characters on thembit racist innit
>>107256303for me it was>go into games store>some dude soldered shit on your PS1>free games forever
>>107256303It was like thisthere was 1 guy who had knowledge/access to cracked gameshe'd either make copies of games for free for you because he's cool and likes the attentionor he'd ask for a trivial amount of money to do it, like 1$ per CD (that you provide) or something.that's it, you didn't know anything about "the scene" except what they'd show you in the funny intro animations
>>107256389My family, and my cousins had chipped consoles. Chump.
virtually non-existent due to the clever engineering of original devchadsas the new era of consoles came in after the first pirate trannies were borntrannies somehow learnt to steal games over the course of the last 20 years
>have 12 years old>interested in puters and vidya>too poor to get consoles and vidya>have old family pc>mess around with family pc>break family pc, docs lost>dad_pissed.png>dad_relaxed.png>ok anon, your young and curious, lets get ur own pc>get first pc, p3 800 / 128 RAM / GF2>granddad dies, inherit SoundBlaster>put SoundBlaster in new pc>discover emulation>free vidya for anon>anon_happy.png>fast forward 20 years>CS degree, remote working, earning good money>got my dad a new pc for himself
>>107256303really difficult honestly(unless it was on a PC or you bought hardware designed for pirating for the NES / Megadrive)see >>107257391There were no resources you could easily find and getting the stuff beyond burnt CDs was very hard. I was born in 1996 however I didn't pirate on console till my Grandma bought me an R4 at a carboot sale for the Nintendo DS and this was probably around 2010 (also had a PSP with modded firmware which I got the same way)
