Bioshock 2 - DRM Update @ Blues

fatBastard(): Just to let you know there is a big difference between Dosbox and a tool that would emulate the authentication server of modern games (or however else they do it) and that is Dosbox is legal and that would be circumventing the DRM which is illegal. Unless permission is given by the owners of the ip or they do it themselves any program that would allow you to play a game that requires online activation after the activation servers have been taken down would be illegal. People may not have problems using it but the people making the program run the risk of companies coming after them.

The comparison is not entirely valid. DOSBox is only legal now because DOS is no longer an active Microsoft product. What is now a valid way of emulating an old OS would have been considered illegal if it had taken place 15 years ago.

The rules of today in the digital world are not necessarily the rules of 5 years down the line and most certainly not 20 years in the future.
 
Joined
Oct 19, 2006
Messages
805
Location
Just outside of Copenhagen
That is not true since otherwise Wine would be illegal and it is not. Also the legalities have nothing to do if a program is still in development or not.Figuring out how an OS work without using any of the original code and reimplementing it to allow programs based on that OS to work in a different OS is not illegal.
 
Joined
Oct 19, 2006
Messages
1,596
That is not true since otherwise Wine would be illegal and it is not. Also the legalities have nothing to do if a program is still in development or not.Figuring out how an OS work without using any of the original code and reimplementing it to allow programs based on that OS to work in a different OS is not illegal.

Exactly - remember MrDOS, DrDOS PCDOS and so on ...
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
14,932
Okay, this semantics discussion is getting a bit old.

1) WINE stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator. DOSBox is.
2) I don't know about some of the others but PCDOS was made by IBM for IBM machines IN AGREEMENT with Microsoft.

The heart of matter is:

Previously:
Problem) Certain DOS could no longer be played on new computers
Solution) DOSBox fixed that problem

In the future:
Problem) DRM verification service is no longer active
Solution) Some software that somehow bypasses the verification process will emerge.
 
Joined
Oct 19, 2006
Messages
805
Location
Just outside of Copenhagen
Okay, this semantics discussion is getting a bit old.

1) WINE stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator. DOSBox is.
2) I don't know about some of the others but PCDOS was made by IBM for IBM machines IN AGREEMENT with Microsoft.

The heart of matter is:

Previously:
Problem) Certain DOS could no longer be played on new computers
Solution) DOSBox fixed that problem

In the future:
Problem) DRM verification service is no longer active
Solution) Some software that somehow bypasses the verification process will emerge.

What exactly are you basing your claim on, though?

You're asking people to feel assured that someone will develop software that will circumvent the activation check - and I assume you also expect that process to be legitimate and legal?

That's the issue, because people can't know - and I personally don't feel assured that will happen.

What IS reasonably certain is that you can crack the game - but that's not a desirable solution for a lot of people, and in my opinion it shouldn't be necessary.
 
Okay, this semantics discussion is getting a bit old.

Problem is that your 'solutions' are mismatched.

With DOSBox, it allows you to play games on a new PC, but there is nothing that stops me from playing it on my DOS PC that I have (or my Win98 PC I still have).

For activation, regardless of *what* PC you have, and even if the company is still around, THEY can decide at any time to simply pull the ability to activate, inherently revoking your rights under EULA.

Yes, we can pirate the game in one way or other, but some would rather hold companies to some level of responsibility to paying customers than assume that illegal activities should be considered standard practice.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
14,932
2) I don't know about some of the others but PCDOS was made by IBM for IBM machines IN AGREEMENT with Microsoft.

Not that I know of it.

To me, it was always an MS-DOS, but specifically adapted to IBM computers.
 
Joined
Nov 5, 2006
Messages
21,908
Location
Old Europe
Problem is that your 'solutions' are mismatched.

With DOSBox, it allows you to play games on a new PC, but there is nothing that stops me from playing it on my DOS PC that I have (or my Win98 PC I still have).

For activation, regardless of *what* PC you have, and even if the company is still around, THEY can decide at any time to simply pull the ability to activate, inherently revoking your rights under EULA.

Yes, we can pirate the game in one way or other, but some would rather hold companies to some level of responsibility to paying customers than assume that illegal activities should be considered standard practice.

And yet, based on the comments here, the end result seems to be that instead of spending time with a game and hopefully having a blast, the time is wasted complaining about something that may or may not happen 1-20 years down the line.

I'm not blind to what you're saying and I would like nothing more than for all this DRM crap to go away for good. That being said, however, I'll be damned if I'm going to let all the pirate lowlifes ruin my gaming fun on top of being the cause of the DRM in the first place. That's why I refuse to let DRM schemes deter me from playing a game I want to play, no matter how archaic or moronic it is.
 
Joined
Oct 19, 2006
Messages
805
Location
Just outside of Copenhagen
Joined
Oct 19, 2006
Messages
805
Location
Just outside of Copenhagen
Actually WINE and Dosbox do essentially the same thing and the main difference is that WINE implements re-engineered dos and windows api's into the linux environment which is faster then emulating Windows and dos. Both projects recreate the environment that the original programs ran in and Dosbox has dos run on top of the OS you are using and WINE integrates it in the OS you are using. An example with Dosbox is that everything about how graphics works is that the environment is recreated exactly how it was originally. DirectX in WINE is translated by the api's into native OpenGL instead of recreating the DirectX environment.

PS. It may be to new for any DRM servers to have been shut down but there are games where their online service has been shutdown and some of the companies are still in business.
 
Joined
Oct 19, 2006
Messages
1,596
PS. It may be to new for any DRM servers to have been shut down but there are games where their online service has been shutdown and some of the companies are still in business.

Perhaps for GAME servers, but it was only last year that MSN Music shut down.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
14,932
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCDOS

According to this link MS was in some way or another involved in the PCDOS project.

From that page :

The original 1981 arrangement between IBM and Microsoft was that Microsoft would provide the base product and that both firms would work on developing different parts of it into a more powerful and robust system, and then share the resultant code.

To me, it's like this :

MS develops stuff
IBM gets it (and MS as well, too)
Both work on it
Both exchange the results
Implicitely: The result of the exchange would be ONE product.

From the same page :

PC DOS and MS-DOS were to be marketed separately: IBM selling to itself for the IBM PC, and Microsoft selling to the open market.

More insight to the whole stuff can be found here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS

Originally MS-DOS was designed to be an operating system that could run on any 8086-family computer. Each computer would have its own distinct hardware and its own version of MS-DOS, similar to the situation that existed for CP/M, and with MS-DOS emulating the same solution as CP/M to adapt for different hardware platforms. So there were many different versions of "MS-DOS" for different hardware. But the greater speed attainable by direct control of hardware was of particular importance, especially when running computer games. So very soon an IBM-compatible architecture became the goal, and before long all 8086-family computers closely emulated IBM's hardware, and a only single version of MS-DOS for a fixed hardware platform was all that was needed for the market. This version is the version of MS-DOS that is discussed here, as all other versions of MS-DOS died out with their system, there were dozens of such "MS-DOS" versions.

While MS-DOS appeared on PC clones, true IBM computers used PC DOS, a rebranded form of MS-DOS. Ironically, the dependence on IBM-compatible hardware caused major problems for the computer industry when the original design had to be changed. For example, the original design could support no more than 640 kilobytes of memory. Manufacturers had to develop complicated schemes to access additional memory. This would not have been a limitation if the original idea of interfacing with hardware through MS-DOS had endured.

PTS-DOS is, by the way, the most modern commercially available DOS-like operating-system (at least which I know of) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTS-DOS
 
Joined
Nov 5, 2006
Messages
21,908
Location
Old Europe
The question that arises here: Will we still be able to play our games 20 years from now. The answer seems to be maybe, yes or no. If we deal with yes or no first, then people are still playing games that came out 20-25 years ago. However, it takes a great deal of patience, I think, to be able to play text adventures from 1976-1986 or so. I love the adventure text based Zork games, but can't seem to get them play correctly on Windows XP. Older games, like King's Qust and Sherlock Holmes (the first one), I still can play. I can still play BG1 and BG2 and other older rpgs from 10-12 years ago.

My point here is this:
It might well be that the industry is moving towards maybe always being online (and even saving in what is called the cloud) when playing a game. And even if the activation servers for say Bioshock 2 should be shut down in the future, maybe, just maybe, it will be so that in 20-30 years time, Bioshock 2 (and Bioshock 1) won't play on our computers anymore. That is, if we don't find a way to go around this - like dosbox has done for the old dos games.

Right now, the only hope that customers/gamers have a for this is to trust companies like Bioware, Take 2 etc. when they tell us that 'if a day in the future, we close the activation servers we will release a patch that makes the need for activating the game goes away.' I'm not sure that I'm ready to trust big corporations like EA, Ubisoft, Activision etc.

As for GFWL, I too, find it to be piece of bloatware; it doesn't work the way it should or ought to, I find. I had to install it to get patches for Fallout 3; it nearly broke my Fallout 3 game ;( Fortunately, I had a restore point...

DLC for day 0 or Day 1, I'm OK with; this makes sure that people are getting motivated to buying the game....
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
2,147
Location
Denmark, Europe
DLC for day 0 or Day 1, I'm OK with; this makes sure that people are getting motivated to buying the game….


I agree as long as it's free. I have no problem paying for DLC that's developed later, but I'm not going to pay extra for something that could have been included in the game.
 
Joined
Oct 21, 2006
Messages
39,129
Location
Florida, US
I agree as long as it's free. I have no problem paying for DLC that's developed later, but I'm not going to pay extra for something that could have been included in the game.

That is the slippery slope potential - right now devs use day one DLC as enticement to buy new and later DLC for profit and continued mindshare. Hopefully that is as far as it goes.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
14,932
I'm not sure why everyone is talking about 20-30 years.

There's absolutely ZERO guarentee they'll be around in ONE year. That's the issue with this kind of DRM. Because you can't really get the sensation that you own the rights to play the game you purchased. You basically pay to loan on good faith, and you'll "probably" be able to play it indefinitely - but there's no way to feel assured.

However, if you have no problem with applying a crack to circumvent the protection, then the issue isn't as bolded. But is that really a desirable state of affairs? What exactly is the upside here? They're not preventing piracy and the no reselling games agenda isn't exactly in the interest of the consumer.
 
Back
Top Bottom