cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/44122961

After decades of living in a linux-FOSS world, I noticed these games at a 2nd-hand street market:

  • Starcraft (few different versions/themes)
  • Age of Empires (few different versions/themes)
  • Civilization

They were a dollar each, so why not. I grabbed. Got home, installed win7 on a machine someone dumped on a curb, but could not install any of the games b/c I live offline. Fucking hell.

When I last played Starcraft well over a decade ago, I lived online and probably thought nothing of it. But it seems clear this shitty requirement is an anti-sharing policy because these games do not inherently need Internet. You can play against the machine or on a LAN. It’s not just the elitist exclusive WAN requirement that pisses me off… there’s a privacy issue too. And what happens when I enter the product key of a used CD? They probably have a tolerance on how many times that can happen, perhaps dependant on whether the hardware changes. Fuck the nannying.

Also consider that Blizzard and Microsoft servers are not going to run forever. They can pull the plug at any time and then no one can install their game. Should be illegal to make installation needlessly dependant on a service. Forced obsolescence.

Some of these games also require a CD to be inserted, which means you must have a fucking noisey CD drive attached at all times. Back when these games were made it was no big deal because all laptops and desktops had CD drives. Not anymore. I’m mostly annoyed by having to insert the disc, wait for it to spin, then I have to hear the loud spin as I play which also wastes power. So I installed Alcohol 120 to image the Warcraft 3 disc (which I still had from yrs past). It has 3 different versions of the crack for the particular shitty scheme used on WC3. None of the images work.

Obviously if I want to play these games I will need warez versions. How good are those dodgy distros these days? I can imagine some are just the original content but you still enter a product key (which I have anyway). But if they still need a WAN that won’t cut it for me. Do the warez versions overcome all these issues? Are they still in circulation?

Alternatively, I should ask, have there been any versions of these games repackaged and re-released for the retro gamers which don’t impose the shitty protections and server dependencies?

If not, I must say unlicensed cracked versions would be the most ethical ones:

  • designed obsolescence thwarted
  • privacy kept
  • more inclusive (offline ppl and those without CD drives)
  • better UX (no fiddling with discs and hearing the spin)
    • freedomPusher@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      1·
      21 days ago

      “Load” is vague. To be clear, the CD player is artificially needed to execute games that are already installed. Of course a CD player is needed for the initial installation step but that’s not what I was bitching about.

      Notable as well: there is sometimes a space saving argument to be made here (from the era of these games creations), and sometimes not. Often all the contents of the CD are copied to the hard drive anyway, for performance. The forced presence of a CD in those cases is just an anti-piracy tactic. In cases where the CD spins during game play, it could be either way… a redundant check to bake-in the anti-piracy throughout the code, or to genuinely load more game content.

    • Auster@thebrainbin.org
      1·
      22 days ago

      Indeed. And furthermore, in days of yore, the sound was even an indication whether things were working or not. A most valuable behavior, in my opinion.

  • Auster@thebrainbin.org
    2·
    22 days ago

    Going by mentions of Windows Live in the list of DRM-free games from Steam over at Fandom/Wikia (link), you should be able to do a partial installation of the dependencies.

    And regarding using the disc drive, you can dump the discs as ISOs or BIN/CUE files, and mount them with WinCDEmu. It even allows keeping a disc mounted between sessions, and works as far back as, afaik, Windows 2000. So hardware needed only for the initial dump. Though beware certain programs, e.g. Chaos Legion, may throw a hissing fit if you try to run the disc somewhere other than the one you used to install the game.

    • Auster@thebrainbin.org
      2·
      22 days ago

      About new versions of such games, I forgot to mention, but you could check GOG or Zoom Platform, nowadays the main ones rereleasing old games, and with a DRM-free philosophy.

      Also, since you got the original files, you could check if there are interpreters, wrappers or engine reimplementations for those games. If there are any, they might even work on legacy systems, similar to ScummVM if your game, even if original and theoretically compatible, has trouble running through the original means (monkey island ptsd ressurging)

      However, I’m not familiar with either games, @freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz, so I won’t be able to source information for either.

    • freedomPusher@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      1·
      21 days ago

      Going by mentions of Windows Live in the list of DRM-free games from Steam over at Fandom/Wikia (link), you should be able to do a partial installation of the dependencies.

      That link is a shit show… tor hostility, then if I visit the archive.org version the page is too fancy for my browser… all the useful info hidden. Thanks for the idea though. Perhaps I will do the dancing to get the info later.

      (update) after going back to the archive.org tab, the lists are loaded… it was just very slow to load b/c the list is LOOONNG. I would like to get that dataset in JSON.

      And regarding using the disc drive, you can dump the discs as ISOs or BIN/CUE files, and mount them with WinCDEmu.

      That only works on unprotected discs. Warcraft 3, for example, uses SecuROM or something to deliberately put defects on the disc that do not get copied with normal tools like dd or whatever. Then the game specifically looks for the defects to verify authenticity. Hence why I mentioned Alcohol 120, which understands securom but strangely did not work in my recent attempt.