Why not just get a real gaming system? Or better yet, a PC?
I already have a PC (Acer TravelMate 721TX, 333 MHz PII with 128 MB RAM, which I bought when I entered college three years ago). It's just barely fast enough to run VisualBoyAdvance at a semi-playable speed. And it's a lot heavier than a Game Boy Advance system. And $200 rechargeable battery packs don't seem to live very long.
But wouldn't it be easier for someone to buy a playstation rather than go to all this trouble to adapt a gamegear?
For one thing, it isn't a Sega Game Gear but rather a Nintendo Game Boy Advance. (The Game Gear was a portable Master System.)
For another, Game Boy Advance has some exclusive titles (Mario Kart Advance, Pinobee, Golden Sun, etc.) that won't hit the PlayStation for at least 95 years because their publishers own copyrights on the games and will not license a port.
Install VMWare (or Virtual PC), and use the guest OS to load the copy-protected music.
Windows: "The file 'Britney Spears - Shitty Pop Song.wma' could not be played, because Windows is running in an emulator, virtualizer, debugger, or other insecure environment. Please reboot the computer, load Windows onto the bare hardware, and try again." Under no circumstances will Microsoft sign the drivers necessary to run Secure Audio Path through vmware.
That is unless you like the swirling hiss of 64K overly compressed tunes.
If you cut out all the stereo separation, MP3 audio at 64 Kbit/s mono sounds halfway decent over the noise of a moving vehicle.
That and changing your playlist more often than our shorts
I ought to write a program that lets users design pairwise transitions between songs, randomly chooses a playlist, mixes the songs, and then calls lame/oggenc to compress the audio.
Perhaps a newbie should learn how to play before joining a game. That's why there's a spectator mode and a single player game!
In some games, either there is no single-player game (EverQuest, Ultima Online, Final Fantasy 11) or the goals of the single-player game are completely different from those of the multiplayer game (Tetris, Dr. Mario, Yoshi's Cookie). In some games, a player can beat single-player on the hardest setting with one hand tied behind his back but get creamed the moment he plays another human being.
You think he's just going to jump on in and start playing without first watching for a bit to see how it's played?
Meatspace basketball has a spectator mode, called ESPN, part of the Disney entertainment conglomerate. But basketball doesn't have a single player.
I was more concerned about the new player who knows the rules after having watched several matches, but whose gun hand slips and shoots the wrong player.
In a related note, the new America's Army game
Will have an intensive single-player training mode. I was merely commenting that some other games don't offer a good tutorial.
I fail to see how hardware can only be trusted if it's got government-approved DRM
If the government doesn't enforce DRM measures (through DMCA, CBDTPA, and other laws that haven't been passed in CANADA), crackers will be able to emulate the DRM and get away with it.
so you must consider yourself an expert on the issues
I've read the bill, and I see no other way of achieving a trusted hardware environment.
And Mallory? Wasn't she the dumb older sister of Alex P. Keaton?
Mallory is one of the "bad guys" in Applied Cryptography. Others include Eve and Oscar.
Most PC games keep stuff on the HDD and use the CD to prevent multiple installs with one CD
They may also play cut-scenes from the CD or DVD if they use FMV rather than the game engine for cut-scenes.
I know of no games that use a full 8 GB, anyway.
Final Fantasy 7 (PC version) and Final Fantasy 8 (PSX version) were each four CDs (2.5 GB). Final Fantasy 10 (PS2 version) is a DVD. Some newer PS2 games have begun to come on multiple DVDs. Think of how big Final Fantasy 12 will be.
But even if all games did have 8GB, I have 150 GB of space
When you rip CDs, do you store the files as wav/shn/flac too? <Valenti>Among consumers, only a hardcore pirate would need that kind of hard disk. Congress, please ban possession of such storage devices without a license.</Valenti>
So how does your cracked kernel decrypt the packet?
Classic man-in-the-middle attack. Watch the game in a debugger to discover the protocol, and then patch an aim-enhancer proxy (or whatever) into the kernel's TCP/IP stack.
(Background: Somebody hates it when the game's original storage medium is used as a dongle for the game because (s)he doesn't want to swap discs all the time. I responded by asking "what do you want, a disc changer for your game console?")
I think he's talking about PC games.
A dual-layer DVD-ROM disc can hold 8 GB of data. A low-end to midrange PC typically comes with 40 GB of hard disk space. Are most players willing to devote 8 GB of that to storing a full copy of each game they play?
Another way is if you kill more than X teammates, you get kicked, or kbanned for a period of time.
Then how will people who just bought a copy of the game yesterday and don't yet have full control of their input devices be able to play? How do we distinguish trolls from legitimate newbies?
They are cryptographically signed, making cheating quite a bit more difficult. Can't connect to the server if you can't decrypt their challenge.
However, an experienced cracker can potentially insert an exploit into printf() and other functions of libc. Even if libc is static, a cracker can still attack the kernel. Neither the kernel nor the BIOS is blessed unless CBDTPA passes.
Most of the cheat programs for the current crop of MMORPG's simply take over the network stream and insert their own, valid commands.
That's because EQ, UO, etc. are real-time games, susceptible to the same MITM aim-enhancers as first-person shooters such as Counter-strike and Tribes. FreeCiv, on the other hand, is a turn-based sim game, which removes the twitch factor that machines are so much better at than humans.
My roommate got a copy of [Tribes] 2, but failed to read the system requirements on the box.
At least it's not like id's Doom 3, which some have said will require a Pentium 5 or ClawHammer processor and a GeForce 5 video card if you want to get anything over 15fps at 240x160. (For comparison, the display of the Game Boy Advance system has 240x160 pixels.)
The preceding post has been brought to you by Exaggeration Enterprises LLC.
If a majority of the particular gaming community doesn't want you there (for whatever reason--you're cheating, you're an asshole, you unbalance their game with your "superhuman skill") you should be out.
Once you beat the game, you're banned from ever playing it again? Way to kill replay value. That may work for the popular first-person shooters, where anybody can throw up an expert-players server, but it doesn't work as well for the MMORPGs where one entity often controls all the servers.
He's good all the time, he knows the levels well enough that he snipes hiding places pretty much at random, killing people he not only couldn't know about but did not in fact know about. He pretty much can't play on any server he isn't admin on anymore.
The only way I can see to distinguish cheaters from good players is social. Set up LAN arcades in public places, perhaps next door to the laser tag parlors. Give everybody the same brand of keyboard and optical mouse. Install code-integrity measures on the servers and clients. Cheating in this environment becomes impossible. So what if playing against somebody in Japan requires actually getting on an airplane?
Of course, you'll have to sign agreements with the games' publishers to get permission to do pay-for-play (called "public performance" in copyright law), but those shouldn't be that expensive.
Mallory can inject her code into the client application and crack any "secure" protocol unless the hardware is trusted, and that can only happen if Congress passes the CBDTPA. Do you really want to give up all fair-use rights just to prevent online gamers from cheating?
having the server not tell each client what others nearby are doing (unless they are in sight)
How will the server quickly determine, during each frame, whether enough of the other player is showing (i.e. not right behind a corner or hidden in a dark shadow) without having to render each frame itself? And how will a server tell a player with good natural aim from a player using a subtle aim-enhancing code patch?
Maybe if they implemented a hardware feature where you could give the processor an encryption key, and sent it an encrypted instruction stream, it would decrypt it on the fly. That would be hard to decrypt, unless the attacker were to get ahold of the key, then they could decrypt it.
Even games which require the cd to run are a pain in the ass, especially when you play a few different games.
If a game didn't have to load itself from the CD or from the DVD, what would it load itself from? What are you asking for? A GameCube with a disc changer?
Please stop trying to force people to live under what you think is "fair".
I'm not trying to force people to live under what I think is "fair". On the contrary, I'm trying to force people to live under what the framers of the Constitution thought was "fair". Why should it be "fair" to let an author's estate deprive the public for 70 years? Thomas Jefferson advocated "limited Times" of about nineteen years. If the founding fathers wanted life plus 70, they would have passed life plus 70 as in the Bono Act, not 14+14 as in the Copyright Act of 1790.
AOL, the parent company of Netscape Communications, has at least 30% of the ISP market in the US, not counting Time Warner cable. AOL is also expanding its foreign markets.
The problem is actually Windows, in that most versions do not know what a zip file is. I think that only recently there is unzip software included in Windows and tied to explorer.
This software, included in Windows ME and Windows XP, is called "Compressed Folders". It provides functions nearly identical to those of WinZip and WinRAR.
That makes the self-extracting zipfile offer no more functionality over a conventional zip file.
Unlike a vanilla compressed folder (.tar.gz,.zip,.rar, etc), a self-extracting archive (.exe,.rpm,.deb, etc) can automatically run the extracted setup.exe application that copies the components where they go and registers them with the operating system.
[The fact that Mozilla does not rely on the vendor's Standard Template Library implementation is] why Mozilla is such a bloated piece of NIH.
Mozilla uses its own template library because some vendors' implementations of the C++ standard library are hopelessly outdated or broken, and without its own template library, Mozilla could not run on those C++ implementations. GNU libstdc++ is not as ubiquitous as we'd like.
(Background: Mozilla 1.0's main competition in the Windows web browser market is Microsoft Internet Explorer. Because of Microsoft's monopoly lock on the PC operating system market, and the company's general greed, some Slashdot users call the company Micro$oft.)
The $ in MS is just getting old
Microsoft's first products were interpreters of the Basic programming language for various computers. In the Basic language, "M$" means "a string variable called M". Consider the use of M$ on Slashdot analogous to the $foo interpolation in the Perl language. (Ignore the fact that Basic doesn't actually do interpolation.)
Slashdot Mirror
Why not just get a real gaming system? Or better yet, a PC?
I already have a PC (Acer TravelMate 721TX, 333 MHz PII with 128 MB RAM, which I bought when I entered college three years ago). It's just barely fast enough to run VisualBoyAdvance at a semi-playable speed. And it's a lot heavier than a Game Boy Advance system. And $200 rechargeable battery packs don't seem to live very long.
The cradle to copy Game Boy Advance cartridges into your PC (so that you can run them in VisualBoyAdvance) costs $45. For only $65 more, you can get a real Game Boy Advance system with a real Afterburner light.
But wouldn't it be easier for someone to buy a playstation rather than go to all this trouble to adapt a gamegear?
For one thing, it isn't a Sega Game Gear but rather a Nintendo Game Boy Advance. (The Game Gear was a portable Master System.)
For another, Game Boy Advance has some exclusive titles (Mario Kart Advance, Pinobee, Golden Sun, etc.) that won't hit the PlayStation for at least 95 years because their publishers own copyrights on the games and will not license a port.
Install VMWare (or Virtual PC), and use the guest OS to load the copy-protected music.
Windows: "The file 'Britney Spears - Shitty Pop Song.wma' could not be played, because Windows is running in an emulator, virtualizer, debugger, or other insecure environment. Please reboot the computer, load Windows onto the bare hardware, and try again." Under no circumstances will Microsoft sign the drivers necessary to run Secure Audio Path through vmware.
That is unless you like the swirling hiss of 64K overly compressed tunes.
If you cut out all the stereo separation, MP3 audio at 64 Kbit/s mono sounds halfway decent over the noise of a moving vehicle.
That and changing your playlist more often than our shorts
I ought to write a program that lets users design pairwise transitions between songs, randomly chooses a playlist, mixes the songs, and then calls lame/oggenc to compress the audio.
stick with feeding cyc reasonably un-controversial things like definitions and humans have two arms and two legs
Not necessarily.
Perhaps a newbie should learn how to play before joining a game. That's why there's a spectator mode and a single player game!
In some games, either there is no single-player game (EverQuest, Ultima Online, Final Fantasy 11) or the goals of the single-player game are completely different from those of the multiplayer game (Tetris, Dr. Mario, Yoshi's Cookie). In some games, a player can beat single-player on the hardest setting with one hand tied behind his back but get creamed the moment he plays another human being.
You think he's just going to jump on in and start playing without first watching for a bit to see how it's played?
Meatspace basketball has a spectator mode, called ESPN, part of the Disney entertainment conglomerate. But basketball doesn't have a single player.
I was more concerned about the new player who knows the rules after having watched several matches, but whose gun hand slips and shoots the wrong player.
In a related note, the new America's Army game
Will have an intensive single-player training mode. I was merely commenting that some other games don't offer a good tutorial.
I fail to see how hardware can only be trusted if it's got government-approved DRM
If the government doesn't enforce DRM measures (through DMCA, CBDTPA, and other laws that haven't been passed in CANADA), crackers will be able to emulate the DRM and get away with it.
so you must consider yourself an expert on the issues
I've read the bill, and I see no other way of achieving a trusted hardware environment.
And Mallory? Wasn't she the dumb older sister of Alex P. Keaton?
Mallory is one of the "bad guys" in Applied Cryptography. Others include Eve and Oscar.
Most PC games keep stuff on the HDD and use the CD to prevent multiple installs with one CD
They may also play cut-scenes from the CD or DVD if they use FMV rather than the game engine for cut-scenes.
I know of no games that use a full 8 GB, anyway.
Final Fantasy 7 (PC version) and Final Fantasy 8 (PSX version) were each four CDs (2.5 GB). Final Fantasy 10 (PS2 version) is a DVD. Some newer PS2 games have begun to come on multiple DVDs. Think of how big Final Fantasy 12 will be.
But even if all games did have 8GB, I have 150 GB of space
When you rip CDs, do you store the files as wav/shn/flac too? <Valenti>Among consumers, only a hardcore pirate would need that kind of hard disk. Congress, please ban possession of such storage devices without a license.</Valenti>
So how does your cracked kernel decrypt the packet?
Classic man-in-the-middle attack. Watch the game in a debugger to discover the protocol, and then patch an aim-enhancer proxy (or whatever) into the kernel's TCP/IP stack.
(Background: Somebody hates it when the game's original storage medium is used as a dongle for the game because (s)he doesn't want to swap discs all the time. I responded by asking "what do you want, a disc changer for your game console?")
I think he's talking about PC games.
A dual-layer DVD-ROM disc can hold 8 GB of data. A low-end to midrange PC typically comes with 40 GB of hard disk space. Are most players willing to devote 8 GB of that to storing a full copy of each game they play?
Another way is if you kill more than X teammates, you get kicked, or kbanned for a period of time.
Then how will people who just bought a copy of the game yesterday and don't yet have full control of their input devices be able to play? How do we distinguish trolls from legitimate newbies?
They are cryptographically signed, making cheating quite a bit more difficult. Can't connect to the server if you can't decrypt their challenge.
However, an experienced cracker can potentially insert an exploit into printf() and other functions of libc. Even if libc is static, a cracker can still attack the kernel. Neither the kernel nor the BIOS is blessed unless CBDTPA passes.
Most of the cheat programs for the current crop of MMORPG's simply take over the network stream and insert their own, valid commands.
That's because EQ, UO, etc. are real-time games, susceptible to the same MITM aim-enhancers as first-person shooters such as Counter-strike and Tribes. FreeCiv, on the other hand, is a turn-based sim game, which removes the twitch factor that machines are so much better at than humans.
My roommate got a copy of [Tribes] 2, but failed to read the system requirements on the box.
At least it's not like id's Doom 3, which some have said will require a Pentium 5 or ClawHammer processor and a GeForce 5 video card if you want to get anything over 15fps at 240x160. (For comparison, the display of the Game Boy Advance system has 240x160 pixels.)
The preceding post has been brought to you by Exaggeration Enterprises LLC.
If a majority of the particular gaming community doesn't want you there (for whatever reason--you're cheating, you're an asshole, you unbalance their game with your "superhuman skill") you should be out.
Once you beat the game, you're banned from ever playing it again? Way to kill replay value. That may work for the popular first-person shooters, where anybody can throw up an expert-players server, but it doesn't work as well for the MMORPGs where one entity often controls all the servers.
He's good all the time, he knows the levels well enough that he snipes hiding places pretty much at random, killing people he not only couldn't know about but did not in fact know about. He pretty much can't play on any server he isn't admin on anymore.
The only way I can see to distinguish cheaters from good players is social. Set up LAN arcades in public places, perhaps next door to the laser tag parlors. Give everybody the same brand of keyboard and optical mouse. Install code-integrity measures on the servers and clients. Cheating in this environment becomes impossible. So what if playing against somebody in Japan requires actually getting on an airplane?
Of course, you'll have to sign agreements with the games' publishers to get permission to do pay-for-play (called "public performance" in copyright law), but those shouldn't be that expensive.
having more secure protocols
Mallory can inject her code into the client application and crack any "secure" protocol unless the hardware is trusted, and that can only happen if Congress passes the CBDTPA. Do you really want to give up all fair-use rights just to prevent online gamers from cheating?
having the server not tell each client what others nearby are doing (unless they are in sight)
How will the server quickly determine, during each frame, whether enough of the other player is showing (i.e. not right behind a corner or hidden in a dark shadow) without having to render each frame itself? And how will a server tell a player with good natural aim from a player using a subtle aim-enhancing code patch?
Maybe if they implemented a hardware feature where you could give the processor an encryption key, and sent it an encrypted instruction stream, it would decrypt it on the fly. That would be hard to decrypt, unless the attacker were to get ahold of the key, then they could decrypt it.
Smells like CBDTPA to me.
Even games which require the cd to run are a pain in the ass, especially when you play a few different games.
If a game didn't have to load itself from the CD or from the DVD, what would it load itself from? What are you asking for? A GameCube with a disc changer?
Securing end client software has always been an extremely difficult problem to solve....
<Valenti>And this is why we need the CBDTPA.</Valenti>
Please stop trying to force people to live under what you think is "fair".
I'm not trying to force people to live under what I think is "fair". On the contrary, I'm trying to force people to live under what the framers of the Constitution thought was "fair". Why should it be "fair" to let an author's estate deprive the public for 70 years? Thomas Jefferson advocated "limited Times" of about nineteen years. If the founding fathers wanted life plus 70, they would have passed life plus 70 as in the Bono Act, not 14+14 as in the Copyright Act of 1790.
Is that 30% world-wide or 30% in the US?
AOL, the parent company of Netscape Communications, has at least 30% of the ISP market in the US, not counting Time Warner cable. AOL is also expanding its foreign markets.
The problem is actually Windows, in that most versions do not know what a zip file is. I think that only recently there is unzip software included in Windows and tied to explorer.
This software, included in Windows ME and Windows XP, is called "Compressed Folders". It provides functions nearly identical to those of WinZip and WinRAR.
That makes the self-extracting zipfile offer no more functionality over a conventional zip file.
Unlike a vanilla compressed folder (.tar.gz, .zip, .rar, etc), a self-extracting archive (.exe, .rpm, .deb, etc) can automatically run the extracted setup.exe application that copies the components where they go and registers them with the operating system.
[The fact that Mozilla does not rely on the vendor's Standard Template Library implementation is] why Mozilla is such a bloated piece of NIH.
Mozilla uses its own template library because some vendors' implementations of the C++ standard library are hopelessly outdated or broken, and without its own template library, Mozilla could not run on those C++ implementations. GNU libstdc++ is not as ubiquitous as we'd like.
(Background: Mozilla 1.0's main competition in the Windows web browser market is Microsoft Internet Explorer. Because of Microsoft's monopoly lock on the PC operating system market, and the company's general greed, some Slashdot users call the company Micro$oft.)
The $ in MS is just getting old
Microsoft's first products were interpreters of the Basic programming language for various computers. In the Basic language, "M$" means "a string variable called M". Consider the use of M$ on Slashdot analogous to the $foo interpolation in the Perl language. (Ignore the fact that Basic doesn't actually do interpolation.)