Posted April 22, 2009
Wishbone
Red herring
Registered: Oct 2008
From Denmark
michaelleung
YOU ARE ALL RETARDS
Registered: Sep 2008
From Canada
SimplySally
Monster Slayer
Registered: Mar 2009
From United Kingdom
Posted April 22, 2009
When talking about SecuROM, you need to understand that there are several different versions of it out there. Early versions of it were completely ineffective at preventing piracy, but they weren't bad for your system or really all that difficult to use. They were little more than a CD check or license key entry built right into the game's executable. There was no online activation, no hidden drivers, no extra software to uninstall, none of the bullshit that started when EA first began using SecuROM 7.x. So, if the game has a version of SecuROM that is prior to 7.x, you probably never actually noticed it and it doesn't do any of the things we all hate.
Ah the fond memories I had of checking ClonyXXL to see what I was up against....
Back then safedisc was one of the most common and things like dummy files or oversized files with illegal TOCs were also prevalent.
These were never anything too tricky to get around for people who knew what they were doing - more just stopped casual copying and passing round friends (unless the crowd was semi tech literate and knew what they were doing).
The first copy protection of that nature I encountered was Worms on the Amiga - bad blocks on the floppy disc designed to prevent copying of the floppy.
Before that games used to have things like black writing on black paper password sheets or mini-novels where you had to enter a requested word from such and such a page....
There are a few sites that describe the old laserlock, safedisc, starforce etc versions pretty well but not sure that I can link there given they tend to house things like No-CD executables and so on as well.