Last week I discovered [Name deleted - Skip] and downloaded Master of Magic, plus what I needed to play it (DOSBox). Last night I downloaded Ultima VI just for the fun of a blast from the past. Early in the game Lord British asks you three game-related questions which you’re supposed to answer by consulting the manual (to prove that you have a legal copy of the game) -
And I answered them all correctly without needing to look anything up. Questions on a game I haven’t played in 14 years, easy.
Oooo, I remember those early days of copyright protection methods. Sim City had one where you were supposed to match a symbol with the name of a city. It was printed on paper that supposedly didn’t work in copy machines.
This was long before most people had a scanner in their house.
Oh, yeah, they were great. Multiple choice questions to prove that you’re an adult. One of them was “Spiro Agnew is… a) something, b) something, c) a social disease, d) something”. Good times.
Incidentally, all of the copy protection questions and their answers are on Al Lowe’s website. I love how LSL6 didn’t HAVE copy protection. You see, it came out on CD, which nobody would ever be able to make illegal copies of. :smack:
Star Control 2 basically required you to use an included star chart (one of the coolest things about SC2. Do they still put stuff like that in computer games?) to find the names of different stars it would list the coordinates of. Probably for similar reasons to those explaining why LSL6 lacked copy protection, this quiz was strictly optional for the CD version of SC2 (any answer, up to and including just absentmindedly tapping the enter key, would get you past the copy protection on the CD).
There’s a quote from an old Popular Mechanics magazine discussing how the new Aircraft carriers, while certainly fascinating, would never take a central role in naval warfare.
In fairness, it was several years before copying of CDs became practical, and they might not have cared too much about unauthorized copying that long after the game had come out.
Master of Magic is a dated but fun game on the Civ theme, but with magic research in place of tech, on a five-colour system that is unashamedly derivative.
Ultima VI is a RPG dating from about 1992.
[Name deleted - Skip] is a website dedicated to “abandonware” - old game code that is no longer marketed, supported or cared about by its rightful owners. So you can copy it to your PC via teh intarweb.
DOSBox is a little utility that makes pre-Windows software think it’s running on a DOS machine - and it’s extremely easy to set up, too.
Man, I gotta try that. I still have my original Master of Magic CD, too. I remember I bought it because it looked like a cross between Civilization and Magic: The Gathering. First thing I saw when I opened the box was a scrap of fuscia paper trumpeting the impending release of the Magic: The Gathering computer game! “Impending,” in this case, meaning, “About three years from now.”
I remember one game, I think it was either one of the Might and Magic games, or possibly King’s Bounty (direct precursor to the Heros of Might and Magic line) where the copy protection required you to enter in a particular word from a particular page of the instruction manual. Problem was, they didn’t make any allowances for the difficulty of finding that word. “Turn to page 12 and enter the 83rd word.” What? Fuck you. I’m quitting and restarting until you give me a lower number.
We must shoot the shit about MoM sometime, then. Only last night I was having fun using Magic Vortex against a Chaos Node that was home to eight Great Drakes and an efreet. I sent in a single Nightblades unit as a “spotter” and the monsters sat there oblivious to the invisible intruder while the Vortex chewed slowly through all of them. That was worth a pair of spellbooks.
No. It’s incredibly lame. In an attempt to save a few bucks, they eliminated all of the cool stuff about actually physically owning a computer game, ironically in a way encouraging piracy, which is part of why they’re trying to save those few bucks.
A lot of games don’t even come with manuals anymore - just a big empty box with some CDs inside. The manual is often included as a PDF on the CDs.
The last cool feelies (that’s what all that stuff is called by geek types) I got with a video game was a poster quality map of the Atlantic convoy routes and air coverage (for different years) with Silent Hunter 3.
FYI, dosbox is not necessary to run MoM in Windows XP. You can enable a Win95 compatibility mode by right-clicking the executable and selecting Properties, then clicking the Compatibility tab.
I’m sure there are some more detailed instructions out there if you google.
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