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From: cseaman@sequent.UUCP (Chris "The Bartman" Seaman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Pirating CD-ROMS
Keywords: CD-ROM
Message-ID: <48778@sequent.UUCP>
Date: 15 Dec 90 02:19:49 GMT
References: <1990Dec11.205920.12986@daffy.cs.wisc.edu> <4751@disk.UUCP>
Organization: Sequent Computer Systems, Beaverton, OR
Lines: 40

specter@disk.UUCP (Byron Max Guernsey) writes:
< And I am almost certain game manufacturers won't produce A LOT for
< this thing until enough applications such as the encyclopedia appear that
< many many people will already have one. 

I wouldn't bet my life savings on that if I were you.

< My last arguement is, not to be overly fussy, but what game do you know of
< that takes up an entire cd rom? The largest game I currently know of (I
< am certain there are other large ones but don't flame) is Kings Quest V
< for IBM (do they have it for amiga?) which is like 10 megs. Maybe 
< even dragons lair! But the point is, it takes 10X the amount of time to
< produce a 10 meg game than it does to produce a one 3 1/2 880k floppy
< game. This means more production on the part of the software dudes, and
< less income during that time of production. 

You assume that all the graphics will be 'hand-drawn' graphics.  What is
to stop a developer from digitizing live action sequences, or producing
spectacular ray-traced animations.  Admittedly, these may still require
some touch-up, but you could easily (and relatively inexpensively) fill
200-300 Megabytes of CD-ROM space.  And this doesn't even mention sound,
which can take up LARGE amounts of disk space.

< Ok, supposing they do put 880k floppies on a laserdisk, now they are not
< preventing piracy..880k could be easily transferred to floppy.

Suppose that a developer places specific block number references in their
software.  Blocks which could not exist on an 880K floppy.  They could
then scatter their files all over the CD-ROM, or not even use a file
structure at all, but just randomly selected absolute sectors.  There
are many ways to prevent even a (relatively) small game from being
pirated from a CD-ROM.

Regards,
Chris
-- 
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