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Historically speaking, many games have not come with complex DRM schemes. The complex ones are pretty recent development.

O RLY? Look up "Spiradisc" here. You see the beginnings of things like enumerating the components of your computer, which Microsoft rediscovered when designing Windows Product Activation.

The following story comes from Andy McFadden:

The wrong error message

In the late hours of September 17th, 1996, the day before the WebTV service was scheduled to go online, a group of us (Rick Daley, Lennart LÃvstrand, me (Andy McFadden), probably Arnold de Leon, plus several others I can't remember) had gathered in the operations center in 275 Alma St., Palo Alto. A collection of network operations and service software engineers were hanging around to bear witness to the official launch of WebTV.

When the fated hour struck, one of the netops folks, Bryce Jasmer, started to go through the registration process with his WebTV box. As with any online service, we figured the good names would go quickly, so it was important to get in and register before The Masses signed up. Besides, there was something nifty about being one of the first people to ever sign up on the "real" service. Until this day, all accounts were "disposable" test accounts.

A few of us were standing around, watching him type, feeling giddy with anticipation and lack of sleep. He'd entered his name, address, and other personal information, and was typing in his user name. This is the name used as the e-mail address. He typed in "jazz", so his e-mail would be "jazz@webtv.net". When he hit "enter" on the wireless keyboard, we heard the "whoom" sound that meant an error dialog was coming up. All eyes turned to the screen.

---

To understand what happened next, it's important to understand a little something about how the service worked. WebTV was meant to be a family-oriented service, so it was important to screen all user names and other externally visible features for profanity. It's impossible to catch everything, but it's not hard to catch obvious things.

The user names were compared against a set of regular expressions. Regular expressions allow you to match against a pattern. For example, "fu.*bar" would match against all names starting with "fu" and ending with "bar". With carefully-chosen patterns, you can catch and reject blatant instances while accepting words like "shitake" and "matsushita" that have a profane word embedded within them.

The same mechanism was also used to prevent users from selecting "forbidden" names, such as "postmaster", "root", "admin", and "help". We had a text file that looked like this:

admin.*
User names may not start with "admin".
postmaster
You're not the postmaster.
poop
That's a bad word.
weenie
That's a bad word.

An entry had two lines. The first was the regular expression to match, the second was the error message that would be displayed to the user. The service code read the file, grabbing two lines at a time, and when a user name was entered it compared the name against every regular expression. An error dialog was displayed for the first one that matched. If nothing matched, the user name was accepted.

The code that read the file knew how to skip over comments. It did not, however, give any special treatment to blank lines.

---

Someone had made some changes to the file with the profanity expressions, and while doing so had added a single blank line after the end of the "reserved" names and before the start of the profane words. When the code read the filter list, it grabbed the blank line as the regular expression, and the word that followed as the error message. As luck would have it, a blank-line regular expression matched anything.

It's midnight. We're all a little punchy. Bryce types in a user name, and the box responds with a very simple message (click here to view).

We start laughing hysterically.

The following story comes from Andy McFadden:

The wrong error message

In the late hours of September 17th, 1996, the day before the WebTV service was scheduled to go online, a group of us (Rick Daley, Lennart LÃvstrand, me (Andy McFadden), probably Arnold de Leon, plus several others I can't remember) had gathered in the operations center in 275 Alma St., Palo Alto. A collection of network operations and service software engineers were hanging around to bear witness to the official launch of WebTV.

When the fated hour struck, one of the netops folks, Bryce Jasmer, started to go through the registration process with his WebTV box. As with any online service, we figured the good names would go quickly, so it was important to get in and register before The Masses signed up. Besides, there was something nifty about being one of the first people to ever sign up on the "real" service. Until this day, all accounts were "disposable" test accounts.

A few of us were standing around, watching him type, feeling giddy with anticipation and lack of sleep. He'd entered his name, address, and other personal information, and was typing in his user name. This is the name used as the e-mail address. He typed in "jazz", so his e-mail would be "jazz@webtv.net". When he hit "enter" on the wireless keyboard, we heard the "whoom" sound that meant an error dialog was coming up. All eyes turned to the screen.

---

To understand what happened next, it's important to understand a little something about how the service worked. WebTV was meant to be a family-oriented service, so it was important to screen all user names and other externally visible features for profanity. It's impossible to catch everything, but it's not hard to catch obvious things.

The user names were compared against a set of regular expressions. Regular expressions allow you to match against a pattern. For example, "fu.*bar" would match against all names starting with "fu" and ending with "bar". With carefully-chosen patterns, you can catch and reject blatant instances while accepting words like "shitake" and "matsushita" that have a profane word embedded within them.

The same mechanism was also used to prevent users from selecting "forbidden" names, such as "postmaster", "root", "admin", and "help". We had a text file that looked like this:

admin.*
User names may not start with "admin".
postmaster
You're not the postmaster.
poop
That's a bad word.
weenie
That's a bad word.

An entry had two lines. The first was the regular expression to match, the second was the error message that would be displayed to the user. The service code read the file, grabbing two lines at a time, and when a user name was entered it compared the name against every regular expression. An error dialog was displayed for the first one that matched. If nothing matched, the user name was accepted.

The code that read the file knew how to skip over comments. It did not, however, give any special treatment to blank lines.

---

Someone had made some changes to the file with the profanity expressions, and while doing so had added a single blank line after the end of the "reserved" names and before the start of the profane words. When the code read the filter list, it grabbed the blank line as the regular expression, and the word that followed as the error message. As luck would have it, a blank-line regular expression matched anything.

It's midnight. We're all a little punchy. Bryce types in a user name, and the box responds with a very simple message (click here to view).

We start laughing hysterically.

If there's a chance it's a plain bitmap, simple visualization can reveal lots of patterns not evident in a hex dump.

I believe the old wardialing tool Toneloc had a mode, or a companion program, to display logs this way. It was easy to see things like "numbers ending in -0100 never get answered" as a vertical red line, for instance.

The important things would be an adjustable margin, to "wrap" the pixels at varying widths, and adjustable bit depth, so you can discover odd packings that might not otherwise be apparent.

If the data might be compressed, have a look at the article Hacking Data Compression for a great, if slightly dated, conceptual overview.

ERANAI (I am not a reverse engineer), but I hope this helps. Let us know if you have any luck!

Sweet Sixteen is an older computer language designed by Steve Wozniak (see http://oldcomputers.net/byteappleII.html and http://www.fadden.com/dl-apple2/sweet16.txt) for the apple ][ and is a little less bloated than Perl.

Read CD-R FAQ

CD-R disk are made of :
cyanine dye: poor chance (green)
azo dye: fair chance
phthalocyanine dye: good chance (often gold color)

It is hard to say which medium of different manufactors are using (make it VERY hard). Your best chance is avoid green CD-R and try gold ones. I know for sure CD-R from HP is phthalocyanine dye. I can play audio-CD made only from HP CD-R on my DVD player.

Normally if the DVD doesn't specify it could play CD-R, then you are on your own. I tried at least 10 different brand of CD-R finally I gave up. I returned my Kones-3000 DVD player and got a Pioneer DV-333. It is one of those who can play CD-R flawlessly. And it plays my burnt VCD on CD-R too.

I guess now that Usenet has become essentially unusable, Slashdot is the place to go when your too damned lazy to spend the five minutes it would take to answer this yourself?

Try this: Go to Google. Type in "CDR FAQ", and press return. Click on the very first returned link., for the "Andy McFadden's CD-Recordable Frequently Asked Questions." Read the table of contents, and follow the link to Can DVD players read CD-Rs?. Read.

It would be really, really nice if the guy who posted to "ask slashdot" had done any homework at all, and found out if there was some "unusual" reason his Sony DVD doesn't work with CD-R disks, such as Sony intentionally not supporting some logical format or if this was just the standard Frequently Asked Question that wouldn't even get into most moderated usenet news groups.

I guess now that Usenet has become essentially unusable, Slashdot is the place to go when your too damned lazy to spend the five minutes it would take to answer this yourself?

Try this: Go to Google. Type in "CDR FAQ", and press return. Click on the very first returned link., for the "Andy McFadden's CD-Recordable Frequently Asked Questions." Read the table of contents, and follow the link to Can DVD players read CD-Rs?. Read.

It would be really, really nice if the guy who posted to "ask slashdot" had done any homework at all, and found out if there was some "unusual" reason his Sony DVD doesn't work with CD-R disks, such as Sony intentionally not supporting some logical format or if this was just the standard Frequently Asked Question that wouldn't even get into most moderated usenet news groups.

I guess now that Usenet has become essentially unusable, Slashdot is the place to go when your too damned lazy to spend the five minutes it would take to answer this yourself?

Try this: Go to Google. Type in "CDR FAQ", and press return. Click on the very first returned link., for the "Andy McFadden's CD-Recordable Frequently Asked Questions." Read the table of contents, and follow the link to Can DVD players read CD-Rs?. Read.

It would be really, really nice if the guy who posted to "ask slashdot" had done any homework at all, and found out if there was some "unusual" reason his Sony DVD doesn't work with CD-R disks, such as Sony intentionally not supporting some logical format or if this was just the standard Frequently Asked Question that wouldn't even get into most moderated usenet news groups.

CD-R was designed to be read by an infrared 780nm laser. DVD uses a visible red 635nm or 650nm laser, which aren't reflected sufficiently by the organic dye polymers used in CD-R media. Some DVD players come with two lasers so that they can read CD-R. CD-RW discs have a different formulation, and may work even on players that can't handle CD-R media.

I realize that it's /. standard to see Black Helecopters&tm everywhere, but this whole "Big Corporations are Evil and out to get us all" thing is getting old. When it's true, get the word out. But for the love of Eris, do some research!
--
If your map and the terrain differ,
trust the terrain.

So its not at all a conspiracy by Sony to protect its music industry. Especially considering the fact that Sony makes several MP3 players.

So its not at all a conspiracy by Sony to protect its music industry. Especially considering the fact that Sony makes several MP3 players.

Information on burnable credit-card sizeed CD-ROMs is available at:
http://www.fadden.com/cdrfaq/faq07.html#[7-15]

From this CDR faq;

The 80mm CD didn't catch on everywhere. In some markets, notably the USA, the smaller discs are rarely seen. The 80mm CD-R made a brief appearance, and then vanished.

And from this person who sells them;

3" CDs were among the first CD singles to be released, they kept the distinction between album and single and were widely welcomed by the record buying public. They were however doomed.
Shortly after they bought CBS, Sony announced that the "extra expense" of making CD players that could accomodate 3" CDs was unnacceptable and, being one of the largest makers of both players and discs, they easily killed the format.
With the release of Minidisc only a few years later a much more likely reason for Sony's actions can be seen.
The 3" format is now highly collectable as the numbers pressed in the late 80s were very small.
Ironically most new CD players, including Sonys, will play 3" CDs.

I suspect that this collectibility factor and the internet, plus $20+ CDs are starting to bring them back. It's just that in some areas (like mine) they are to be found nowhere in stores.
If they were to charge $1 a single I'd bet you'd see them everywhere on earth though.

Note that exposure to heat or direct sunlight can greatly reduce the life of the media. You haven't been leaving those CDR's on the front seat of your car have you?

The section of the FAQ which discusses longevity can be found here.

Note that exposure to heat or direct sunlight can greatly reduce the life of the media. You haven't been leaving those CDR's on the front seat of your car have you?

The section of the FAQ which discusses longevity can be found here.

I fear we may be wandering off topic, but according to the CD Recordable FAQ (www.fadden.com/cdrfaq/):

Pressed CD's may last as little as 10-25 years.

CDR's once recorded should last at least 75 years, but strangely only have an unrecorded shelf life of 5 to 10 years.

You joke but this is already being done. One of my games is distributed on CD-ROM containing allmost 700MB. It is impossible to copy (with my consumer CD-RW at least)

Are you sure you don't just need longer CD-R media. 80 minute (~703 MB) CD-R media exist, though according to the CD-R FAQ, they're more expensive.

And longer CDs (if not CD-ROM) have been around a while. I have quite a few CDs that are over 74 minutes.

Buy a card that will allow you to go from DAT to hard disk digitally. Make sure you get one that can handle the same digital standard the DAT recorder uses, i.e. S/PDIF (Sony/Phillips Digital Interface Format, sometimes referred to as "domestic") or AES/EBU ("professional").

Some of the solutions for the PC are the DigiDesign AudioMedia (see http://www.digidesign.com/), the Zefiro Acoustics ZA2 (see http://www.zefiro.com/), the AdB Digital Multiwav Pro (see http://www.adbdigital.com/), the Digital Audio Labs CardD+ (see http://www.digitalaudio.com/products.htm), or the Turtle Beach Fiji (see http://www.tbeach.com/products/fiji.htm). The CardD+ comes highly recommended. There may be newer versions of these products, so be sure to check out the web sites.

Visit http://www.digitalexperience.com/cards.html for a feature comparison of many different models.

A cheap S/PDIF card available from Computer Geeks (http://www.compgeeks.com/) was evaluated by some newsgroup readers. Apparently there were some problems with the physical dimensions of the card (too wide for some PC slots), the documentation is poor, and the voltage level for both input and output was TTL instead of standard S/PDIF. You're probably better off with one of the established brands unless you're sure about what you need.

You should record from the DAT onto your hard drive, and then record the CD from there. If you try to record directly from DAT you'll likely end up with a lot of wasted CD-Rs due to buffer underruns or minor mistakes. You should use Disc-At-Once recording for best results; Jeff Arnold's DAO software is recommended for this on the PC.

One issue you need to be aware of is that some older DAT recorders can only record at 48KHz, while CDs are recorded at 44.1KHz. If this is the case with your equipment, you will have to do a sample rate conversion. The DSP on cards like the ZA2 will do this for you, or you can use an audio editing program like CoolEdit or Sound Forge.

There *are* CD-R drives that have analog inputs, and can record directly from audio sources. See section (5-12).

If you use a DAT and haven't been to the DAT-heads home page, you should definitely check out http://www.atd.ucar.edu/rdp/dat-heads/.

If you want to manipulate audio DATs directly from your computer, you need a DDS drive with special firmware. The SCSI DDS drives that are typically sold for backups don't have the firmware required to handle DAT tapes. Most SGI workstations can do this, and Mac users should check out http://www.demon.co.uk/gallery/StudioDAT.html. If you have an Archive Python DDS drive, check out ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/pub/DATlib.

An interesting combination of technologies is the DAT-Link from http://www.tc.com/, which connects to the digital connectors on the DAT machine (or MD, DCC, or CD player) and the SCSI interface on a computer. The device can be controlled from other computers on a network.

If you're interested in mastering production audio CDs, you should take a look at http://www.sadie.com/.