"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). "
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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.
I did exactly this thing when I was a broke teenager. The files in my ID1 directory that I shuffle around from computer to computer to this day came from that disc 30 years ago. (I still have the disc, but not the case.) I did, however, purchase Quake II and III when they were released. And many years later bought Quake on Steam. I think they got their money's worth from me after all.
(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.)
It’s worth getting the Quake shareware disc for the NIN soundtrack. Official track names are now available following the vinyl release a few years ago. This is the only CD release of the soundtrack. Just don’t forget to skip track 1.
Mind that every Quake release includes the same soundtrack, it's not just the shareware version ;)
There's millions of such CDs in the wild, both shareware and fully purchased copies.
The data track never sounds very good. A little too industrial for my tastes.
Now I'm curious if it's possible to make a data track that has at least some resemblance to actual music. That could be an interesting challenge if it can't obviously be ruled out.
Was there anyway to make this work unless every CD was burned with a different key used to do the encryption?
Maybe have n versions of the CD (maybe 16, or 32), so there are n decryption keys. When the buyer recites the code over the phone, the program run by the salesperson can identify which key is used based on the number.
The hacker groups would be a little frustrated trying to find all of the different CDs.
Some sort of public key crypto scheme + including hard-to-change local device characteristics in the challenge.
A reminder that CD-ROMs are pressed from glass masters, not burned like CD-Rs. I wonder if anyone has tried something like this with burned discs, though.
You would need some sort of hardware serial number system for PCs and a whole security infrastructure to verify that the serial number being used for the unlock wasn't faked. Then you could do per-PC unlocks. I'm not aware of anything like that being widespread back in the Quake days, though these days every computing device you own probably has a unique ID burned into ROM somewhere.
Supposedly Xbox One+ discs are individually serialized which was originally going to be used for their DRM system at launch that was walked back.
Ha, I remember buying the shareware disk and unlocking every game on there. Plus you got the soundtrack which was pretty cool.
Did it work as an audio CD, the way PS1 games do?
Yes, the game just played it as a regular CD. In fact, if you put a different disc in the drive it would play the tracks from there instead. There were also console commands to change the track, stop the music, loop, or even reload the disc information if you needed to refresh it after swapping CDs.
Man, those CompUSA and Computer City pictures take me back. Spent too much time there (when the 7300 was my regular Mac, the CompUSA "Apple store" was my primary source of software). Probably still have some of those free Computer City floppies in a drawer somewhere.
I was wondering how it was economical to burn every CD with a different key. Turns out it was not!
The "incredibly expensive Intel Pentium" image link 404s.
Man, if I were id, I'd sue the hell out of Testdrive for selling me that broken security system...
That box art is so cool. They don't make em like they used to!
Is it really fair to call these such algorithms "security through obscurity"?
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?
The obscured part was pretending the unlocker needs external information
I guess they could have done a public/private key pair in 1996, but doing that over a phone call was going to be painful. A simple password read over the phone and verified by the software was the best solution at the time.
Mind, this was also intended for a world where internet connectivity was not to be expected. The majority of PC owners were not online.
How would your scheme work? You use RSA to encrypt the entire thing? Or you use it to get a key for a block cipher and then use that?
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?
Which is true, so the distribution of the software cracker would have been fairly limited I would have thought.
Hells yeah qcrack.zip
I was 12 years old and had qcrack on a floppy from a buddy. Everyone had it. Didn't even have to have internet.
I think you right, however they left all the right clues to decrypt it in days. You really don't want to do that.
how come the pictures in the store say Compu USA? I remember it as CompUSA and this image seems to show the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CompUSA_Santa_Clara_2.jpg
is it an AI-generated image of 1990s CompUSA?
The computers in the photo and the layout of the store and signage are also quite strange.
I fed the image into Gemini and it could not detect that it’s legit or AI, but in addition to the wrong store name, the other banner that’s supposed to day SOFTWARE says TWARE or something like that. It sure seems like AI to me.
This screw up ended up costing id Software millions in sales. With the Doom franchise they only included the first episode in the shareware version. But to save a buck I guess they decided this was better than mailing a second CD with the full game on it. Then doubling down on that greed by putting their entire game library on the disc. This is right about the time John Romero and John Carmack parted ways, can't help but wonder if this debacle played a role. And by all accounts Quake's development was painful, so imagine this happens after going through hell getting a game out the door.
Okay, I haunted CompUSA in my teen years and I purchased my first 386 system there. So the photograph included in this blog seems bona fide.
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?
It’s not Mandela effect, it’s AI.
