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The title that made me go out and buy a CD-ROM drive was "Wing Commander III", released during the holidays of 1994, a year and a half before Quake 1. This was peak "Silliwood", when games started to use FMV cut-scenes starring bankable actors like Mark Hamill. Games were still being released for the SNES at this point, so imagine the contrast!
In the age before wikipedia or ubiquitous internet access, it was also pretty amazing to have access to a multimedia enhanced encyclopedia. Storing large amounts of data was still a tricky thing. It would take a few years for CD-R's to arrive, and there would be a plethora of competing technologies like Zip drives. Looking back, it seems like computer technology was moving especially fast in the 90's.
And yes, I think we both lived through the most rapid period of technological change (so far). Moore's law was real, the improvements each year were both felt and needed, and the software was coming along for the ride.
Quake was huge when it was launched - there'd never been anything like it. Of course, on my crappy Cyrix 6x86 and some similarly lame graphics card, I recall having to play it at something like 15fps. That wasn't great.
Good memories playing that one on that massively heavy monitor that was normal back then, under the blankets with ice on the inside of the windows and on top of the blanket.
The real weird one from that era was the 7 segment led MHz displays that were popular in the 386/486 era. It was weird because the the chips could not change speed in the first place. And I don't want to say every system was like this, but every one I ever saw was set by a set of static jumpers or a dip switch. When you upgraded your cpu you put the little sticker that came with it on the chassis and changed the jumpers, they served the same purpose.
The game Titanfall on PC has the audio in it twice, compressed and decompressed. The decompressed was for machines with dual core or less so that there was enough overhead to keep the game running.
(There were some who believed that making the shareware disc easily-crackable was an intentional stroke of genius. It got people who couldn't afford the full retail version to buy the game and expand its popularity. The argument being that $10 was a fairly ludicrous amount of money to pay for a single shareware game. Shareware CDs tended to be $5 on the high end, or free with most computer/gaming magazines.)
I doubt it. I would believe that the id guys weren't too choked about the lost revenue after the fact, but the business guys probably believed the scheme would work (especially since they contracted a company that said "yes, this will work").
Aside from that, the shareware cd was incredible marketing - the digipak cd case was the kind of art and paper construction that nin was using on their discs (like the Broken EP), and the disc itself has nice art with the four logos in cardinal directions. I bought a copy of the registered disc from ebay years later and it's in a jewel case with really crappy artwork vs the shareware version, it was a surprising disappointment.
That was pretty tough in that day and age. Especially from pirate sites.
mIRC had some good servers but getting someone to keep a direct connection with you for that long was problematic too.
And then if you didn't have a dedicated phone line for the modem...
Although you still wouldn't download a CD, simply because... you wouldn't have been able to take it home with you! Hard drives were in many cases smaller than a single CD. Anything more than a few 10s of MBs would have been considered excessive.
well, if dialup cost more than just buying the game, it makes sense to buy it rather than pirate. also, if you care about audio then you'll get the cd, becuse downloading 400MB of audio over dialup isn't fun.
compared to that a crack is just a single binary.
There is very slightly more to it than just the mixed-mode sessions: the audio tracks on the Quake CD were mastered with pre-emphasis, so your ripper or player needs to apply corresponding de-emphasis EQ in order for them to sound correct. 1996 was actually a strangely late year to find any CD mastered with pre-emph; it was mostly an '80s thing: https://www.studio-nibble.com/cd/index.php?title=Pre-emphasi...
On top of being a technique that had fallen out of common use by that time, Quake has the pre-emphasis metadata flagged in the subcodes but not flagged in the TOC, so some software players/rippers like (annoyingly) Exact Audio Copy won't heed it: https://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Comparison_of...
Here's a side-by-side comparison — my EAC rip of my MacSoft version of Quake (left) alongside the output of `sox_ng deemph` for the same file (right): https://i.ibb.co/9m18CSsk/Emi-2026-08-17-18-52-48.png
And if you're curious, here's the pre-emphasis subcode channel Q flag and pre-emphasis frequency response as described in the Red Book standard, and sox_ng's code for undoing it:
― https://audio-union.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Red-Book-...
― https://audio-union.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Red-Book-...
― https://codeberg.org/sox_ng/sox_ng/src/branch/main/src/deemp...
Although if someone has been unknowingly listening to the pre-emphasized tracks for thirty years, maybe the ‘incorrect’ one is what sounds right to them? :)
> Quake has the pre-emphasis metadata flagged in the subcodes but not flagged in the TOC, so some software players/rippers like (annoyingly) Exact Audio Copy won't heed it
I learned that this is an intentional deficiency in EAC: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/eac-not-detecting-pre...
> For a short while, up to version 0.95b3 [in 2004], Exact Audio Copy had a manual function to actually scan the audio area of the disc also [talking about subcode channel Q versus the TOC] to find if tracks used pre-emphasis. This was removed due to some perceived legal threat. Now, basically, a standards-compliant disc that doesn't use the TOC kludge won't show "pre-emphasis"
And sure enough, the Red Book standard mentions usage of the other three flag bits alongside the pre-emphasis flag: https://audio-union.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Red-Book-...
The adjacent bit is “copy prohibited” versus “copy permitted”, which is not a piece of metadata I knew Compact Disc had. Makes a lot more sense why EAC would remove that feature in the legal climate of the P2P era, because to look for one flag also must look for the other, and this way it's out of sight and out of mind and Gee Your Honor We Didn't Know You Couldn't Do That if someone uses EAC to rip a “copy prohibited” disc. I wish I could get this feature back in 2026 though :p
I did verify that the audio is identical down to an offset, though, between the two.
> The adjacent bit is “copy prohibited” versus “copy permitted”, which is not a piece of metadata I knew Compact Disc had.
I wonder if any equipment ever actually used those other flags for anything?
There's millions of such CDs in the wild, both shareware and fully purchased copies.
While not being familiar with the Windows side of things, I did frequent the a.b.m.a newsgroup being a broke student. It was always impressive to me to see how quickly someone would post a binary before the crack was posted. I remember one app I was very interested in posting on Friday, and the crack available when I checked back on Monday. Even apps that needed a physical dongle for the ADB port were cracked and not just the apps that needed a key typed in to unlock. Later, the apps that would clone a USB dongle came along, and one software company that used USB dongles actually advised using this tool when we started running their software on Blade servers that did not support adding 24 USB devices.
1. Launch the app.
2. Trigger the "not registered" screen.
3. Search for the string in the binary.
4. Search for code that references the location of the string and squint hard until you spot the "check if CD-key is valid" section.
5. Patch the final opcode from "jnz" to "jz". If you felt fancy, reverse engineer the checking algorithm to create a keygen instead of a patch.
Anticracking methods became mainstream in the late 90s, but they weren't very sophisticated and most amounted to obfuscation.
Long live +ORC, +Fravia and CracksLatinos.
Switching 0x74 to 0x75 and vise versa lead to me ordering the free Intel books and diving into assembly and osdev for a while. There was something zen-like wading through disassembled code with a complete beginner mind and looking for patterns. This and reading Phrack around the "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" times are probably my favorite memories related to computing because I only had a very vague understanding of what was going on mixed with a sense of "wait you can do this" and a lack of readily available information.
> Later, the apps that would clone a USB dongle came along, and one software company that used USB dongles actually advised using this tool when we started running their software on Blade servers that did not support adding 24 USB devices.
That's a good one!
The sentence "This created an only-too-familiar situation where illegitimate users enjoyed a better experience than paying customers." is a direct reference to these system which annoyed people who actually paid for their game!
I have heard of several cases where Siemens technicians and support staff would use a well-known "crack" (actually more of a keygen combined with license file manager) or guide customers how to obtain and use it...
Remember, legally (usually), the really important part is the proof of contract and payment, not exact way the software was activated
> The phone number is still active today. However you don't reach the unlock center since CompUSA went out of business. The Superstore chain closed between 2007 and 2008. Instead of an unlock operator we get an automated message to sell us elderly stuff.
I remember how stuff like that presented an insurmountable obstacle as a kid. Buying stuff in the store, sure, but calling phone numbers or writing letters to companies? No way.
I like how it has come full circle today, with the phone number being inaccessible once again...
That wasn't a new idea at the time. In 1994 Apple distributed a "software store" CD-ROM called Software Dispatch that implemented the same idea: https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/apple-software-dispatch-from-1.... The thing was full of demos, and if you wanted to buy the full version, you just had to call some number to get an unlock code.
I think I had at least one other CD-ROM that implemented the same concept. I'm sure there were tons of others.
Since the challenge rotate every 5 minutes, there must be some way for a user to enter against an old challenge, right? Else they call, get a code and nothing.
But even with that out of the way, the decryption key must be the same across all discs, since there is only 1 master disc.
So the challenge/serial must combine to create a decryption key, which can be shared across users.
I always wondered why Final Doom didn't unlock with QCRACK - I always assumed it was a bug with the keygen, never realized it wasn't possible to purchase it from the disk at all!
1. https://rmolina-co.blogspot.com/2016/08/qcrack-y-la-belleza-...
"Originally pressed on the same disc as the game, Quake was otherwise commercially unavailable until its release on vinyl in September 2020"
Soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbLttdCOgCM
Later on there was a generation of two-conductor cables that used SPDIF/PCM Audio instead of analog audio for better fidelity.
(E.g. this one: https://pavel.network/using-cd-drive-as-poor-man-audio-playe...)
The hacker groups would be a little frustrated trying to find all of the different CDs.
It was not possible to manufacture at the time at scale.
Surfacing this gem of a razor here, as it's buried deep in the (fantastic) blog post. Indeed, all too often, what we attribute simply to stupidity/ignorance, as per the classic Hanlon's razor, is actually downstream of market/client/management/deadline etc. pressure.
> Described as is, there is no flaw in this process. The secret seed comes from the unlock server, tied to a CHALLENGE/SERIAL that could not be reused. But the hacker team GNOMON found a way.
> The QUAKE unlock program FLOW.EXE that ships on the CD is capable of generating the SERIAL from the CHALLENGE on its own. All it does is check that its own locally-generated SERIAL and the SERIAL entered by the user match! The entire protection mechanism relies on security by obscurity.
If phone support issued an encrypted decrypt code that could only be used with your challenge code to decrypt the decrypt code, replay wouldn't be as trivial.
Every CD is identical, so no matter how iD went about this there's only ever one decryption key (per title, I assume) and those keys must either have been encoded in iD support's response, or already stored on the CD. TestDrive sold iD on the notion that the process was too hard for hacker groups to reverse engineer, and it wasn't.
I'm pretty sure I bought it for $6.66
Why do we think that CCITY is a code for Computer City and not Circuit City?
Gold was ~$400 back in 1996. Now it's ~11 times that.
An expensive game however you gib it.
Install locates the damage and gives you code encoding locations. Over the phone You receive ECC code. No more magic keygens, pirates have to distribute whole multi megabyte games.
Of course there are voice that do want real disks but sadly that time is over. Digital sales won.
Like 15 years ago Steam launched CEG (Custom Executable Generation) - I remember reading a write-up a while ago, but each user had a customer launcher generated on install I think, and I think there was an extra segment put into the .exe file and that was put to use somehow, though I don't know if CEG is still a thing.
By that logic, wouldn't real symmetric crypto also be considered the same, since it's still just math that similarly swaps the data with other bytes, based on an "obscured" password or key?
Mind, this was also intended for a world where internet connectivity was not to be expected. The majority of PC owners were not online.
I feel like either way, you'd need the key to be different for every CD, otherwise you could just share the shared key. But if the encryption of every CD is different, why not just share the block cipher key directly? They can have a list of CDs and the associated key(s).
What additional security or functionality does an RSA like step add here?
If I ask you to pass on a message to someone, and the message is encrypted using a symmetric key known only to me, and I expect the recipient to be able to decrypt it because he knows that the key is written on the back of the paper, that's security by obscurity. You're just as able to do the decryption as the intended recipient is; I'm just hoping that you won't realize that.
I have a rather badly written tool [2] I made about 5–6 years ago. If you connect it to your Google Custom Search Engine (along with the appropriate CSE keys), you can quickly search, copy, and download images from before 2022. It also has a ban list so you can filter out Shutterstock, Alamy, and other heavily watermarked sources.
The app is a hot circle of garbage code, but it might still be useful as a starting point.
Except their logo or name was never "Compu USA". Where in the world did they get a store hung with signs that all say "Compu USA"? Is this some Mandela Effect that has me in its clutches? The business was definitely never named or branded that way. I did my Wikipedia and Bing Images research. There are no serious search hits. Gemini is giving some truly b.s. explanations that I do not believe.
Is this a concrete example of a USA store tolerating mis-branded signage... inside their own store? Or is it some third-world knockoff? The merch on the shelves, the bros shopping for themselves, the tie-wearing salesmen, they all seem totally legit. What kind of big-box computer store lets that happen to their signage?
Don't get me wrong. I like the internet, but...