Wow, that brings back memories. Long nights, CRTs, that fresh and health-promoting smell of warm electronics in poorly ventilated spaces, microwaved garbage food, sugary drinks … not sure how my friends and I survived until adulthood.
I'd say you'll feel miserable and will wonder what is it you are missing from the old days. We look at it with rose tinted glasses, but for all practical purposes, everything was significantly worse back then. The kind of hardware and software we have available today was the stuff of the wildest dreams and imagination.
I remember we could spend entire weeks in 4 player Doom 2 deathmatch during summer with my friends. We could spend an entire day just playing made-up scenarios where we tried to kite cyberdemons from one part of the map into another (an exercise which we called demon shepherding).
I fired up Doom 2 again on one of the many ports and it looks great, all the nice memories came flooding back, and yet it wasn't the same. It made me realize that the magic wasn't in the games, or the computers or the people. The magic was in us being a bunch of kids born into infinite curiosity and no (real) responsibilities. That magic unfortunately cannot be recreated in adult life.
Now if you spend an all-nighter on any hobby, your 30+ year old body will wake up feeling rubbish the next day. Do it 2-3 days in a row, and you'll feel like death.
I can afford any piece of hardware and any game my heart desires, my steam library numbers more than 200 games. I have played less than half of them, and less than a quarter to completion. It's the age old curse of aging :)
When you are young, you have time but no money.
When you are old, you have money but no time.
Hey, wake up call, not just to parent commenter but anyone.
If you feel this way in your 30's chances are good you should probably spend more time focusing on your physical health. Start getting more exercise and working on your diet.
You don't need to go crazy, just make small improvements and try to stick with them as much as you can. Start simple: Go for a short walk in the morning when you get up. Cut back on refined sugars, alcohol and sugary drinks.
I'm in my early 30's and my capacity to push hard and be durable is stronger than ever. But I made small but steady steps on my diet and kept up a modicum of conditioning throughout my 20's. I love backpacking, so "durability" is something I'm very interested in.
For example, this weekend I was easily able to stay up and game with friends in their early to mid 20's(UFC 5 release) until the wee hours of the morning. I then slept curled up in a ball on the couch(it was cold and that position kept me warm) and bounced up first thing in the morning after like 3 hours of sleep feeling great.
I don't do things like that often because it runs counter to being healthy. Sleep is when your body repairs itself, and it is constantly taking damage. My experience also is that when you are young, you are just less in-tune with your body. By the time you are 30 most people are actually able to recognize how detrimental sleep deeprivation is in the moment.
Of course you can slow down the process through living healthier. My point is: when you are young, you don't need to. You can go weeks having little sleep and be fine. You don't need to actively pursue a healthy lifestyle in order to avoid feeling drained. Your body reaches the peak in your 20s. After that it's a progressive decline.
In your 30s, no matter what you do, your ability to recover starts to decline and you can no longer do stuff consequences free like before.
You say if yourself: as long as you get enough sleep most of the time, you can pull an all nighter and feel fine. Pull 3 in a row and throw in some drinking, and you'll note a sharp difference between 25 year old you and 35 year old you.
Genetics plays a huge role in this. Some people win the lottery. However, by your 40s you realize that some activities might simply be off limits. Repetitive back injuries from lifting too vigorously mean that you have to cut back on deadlifts. You get dehydrated more easily and the symptoms are worse. You need to watch your ankle after having twisted it too many times during football.
You have to accept it and move on. Some magic you had is lost, but you can usually replace it with other magic. You can't play 12h with your friends every day, but now you can afford a nice car for example, etc...
You can't go clubbing 5 days a row, but you have the focus to train for a marathon and finish it.
My post was about recognizing that the circumstances that make certain things possible when we are young simply disappear. Accept this and move on, there are other things that one can do.
Citation needed. Plenty of people only reach their physical peak at 35+. It's not too late!
> You have to accept it and move on
No, you don't. You can bounce back, but it requires effort. All I can say is it's better to learn early than when you are 65+ and just had major surgery that you need to bouce back from if you want to keep living a normal life.
Yeah, I was stronger and felt better in my mid to late 30s than I'd ever felt at a younger age, and would sometimes go out clubbing and then hit the gym on no sleep and still push out personal bests...
Even my 18 year old self would have killed to feel like that.
But at 30 I couldn't walk a flight of stairs without pain, went to my doctor and was handed an exercise sheet for retirees and told off, and that was what finally got me to address my health, so there's still time to fix it for anyone who feels like that and still time to reach heights of strength and energy you didn't know we're possible.
I lapsed for multiple years in my early 40s, but even with that, after being back in the gym for just a few months I'm still for the most part, apart from a bit slower recovery, feeling better today at 48 than I did at 30, and I'm far stronger and with better endurance (though I still feel weak because I know how much I have lifted, and while Im easily at 5x+ the strength I had at 30, I am so far only back up to 60% of my peak)
Recently I played a game of Civilization 1. It actually did take a me back to that feeling of awe that I had as a child, except now the sound worked and I was able to read English so I actually knew how to play, which enhanced the experience.
Yep, same here. I fire up my 386DX-40 and Pentium-133 occasionally.
Civilization 1 and 2 are still beyond awesome. Very playable and loveable games.
I play Doom II now more than I did when I was a kid.
Mortal Kombat 3 is the best.
Windows 95 and 98 are likely the best Window GUI ever for me.
Microsoft Office 4.0 is pretty fast on a 386 with 4 MB of RAM running Windows 3.1.
At the age of 41 I've bought my first non-pirated version of Magic Carpet and now understand how to play this game. This game is freaking awesome.
I can now afford to buy Sound Blaster AWE32 without asking my parents!
IRC is still awesome. mIRC and EFNet still work!
Hey, an IRC dude and Doom 2 player here too :) We play ocasionaly using zandronum.
If anything, find us on #games. Our IRC homepage: http://damnet.uu3.net/
Reminds me of playing life on a minicomputer at my dads work in 1970. It's hard to grasp the feeling of seeing that when nothing like it exists elsewhere. Almost everything mechanical in 1970 was a purely mechanical device without a shred of agency.
At the heart computers can represent and transform complex structured data iteratively. That was new new 50 years ago.
There’s actually an SNES version of Civ. Surpassingly playable without a mass, but processing time on turn end is really long. To the point where it’s not really playable past, say, 1700 or so because it gets to the point where it takes over a minute to end each turn and advance.
It took like a decade to get average LCD screen to look as good as old CRT. And still need a ton of post-processing to make old pixel art games to look as good as before on LCD.
And I did play a bunch of games 10-20-30 years after they were released and they still hold up. My limit seems to be around SNES-era graphics, before that it just feels too ugly and clunky for me.
Sure, many games just feel like any modern titles do everything better, but some play just fine if you can stomach some of the obsolete mechanics.
> I fired up Doom 2 again on one of the many ports and it looks great, all the nice memories came flooding back, and yet it wasn't the same. It made me realize that the magic wasn't in the games, or the computers or the people. The magic was in us being a bunch of kids born into infinite curiosity and no (real) responsibilities. That magic unfortunately cannot be recreated in adult life.
I thought about it a lot and come to conclusion that every new interesting experience bumps our "standard" up and so once you accumulate a ton of that it's just harder and harder to be wowed by new game, even if it is just fine, fun and plays nice. But me getting my first car in my 30s was still thrilling and I was giggling like mad so dunno about "kid" part. Yeah kids know shit all so everything new is exciting but that doesn't mean you can't find magic moments in the adulthood, just amount of work required is higher.
Oh boy. I got my friend's old CRT when he was moving. Carried down 3 flights of narrow stairs, drove the hour back to my house, loaded it up the front steps, got my PS2 out of the attic, was so excited... and the PS2 doesn't work anymore.
Ditto. I lucked into being a courier. We had a second phone line at my house and while we cancelled it, Bell Atlantic left it active for three YEARS, but no active billing attached to it, so I could call anywhere in the world for free. I used Slip.NET for years too, and became a courier between EU and North America, since I had free long distance I could make the long calls to upload/download. To this day I have spoken aloud my warez courier handle exactly once, to my wife, and I doubt she remembers it. There's two other people in the world who know (each ran a BBS in the 412 that were my US endpoints), but I doubt they remember today, and I have no plans on becoming culpable what that identity did. :D
Same! And APC rings a bell - were they MP3 and ISO?
I was an MP3 courier in a group on a lot of global top sites. I remember being in an irc chan for one of them (I think it was the hungarian one) and kali of the top group RNS stated his birthday or something else personal and said "oh crap I shouldn't have said that" lol. He was indicted by the DOJ in 2009! He was found not guilty of conspiracy to commit copyright infringementalthouh 4 other members pleaded guilty.
They busted sites from time to time but RIAA couldn't do anything substantial. I stayed away from movies and tv because that was riskier and I enjoyed getting music a week or two before the p2p platforms got them. And also getting high quality rips. The sister group that did ISOs eventually got busted.
Saw the move from ftp to fxp and shell accounts and semi-auto and automated trading. Some government officials would spend years to infiltrate the groups to bust the sites and members.
Anyway, it was with being a courier that I got interested in code and had an insane amount of lines to handle all the topsite rules on what they would accept and I traded semi-automated. We even had a UI to help.
I actually met a few people from those days in person and they were really cool. Still friends with one of them today. Many groups required meeting in person or doing a phone call before you could join and then they eventually relaxed that.
MP3. They were mostly rippers but I was a courier who would get their stuff on topsites and then the indies or courier only groups would distro it. I have trouble remembering all the structure and rules (written and unwritten) after all these years, but an ASCii NFO file still makes my heart leap like nothing else!
Ah yes! So APC was more like an RNS then. I recall now after looking up some of your groups' releases too. APC was the next best group as far as releases to RNS. I probably have a ton of those NFO files from back in the day and the courier mp3 rankings for EU and US. I was #1 US and top 5 Europe once. EU was quite hard due to competition and latency, although a uni shell account certainly helped. :)
Most were current year only US releases, 192kbps and VBR?. Some accepted 320kbps and older releases if they had never been ripped. Some topsites only accepted releases from certain groups. My favorite site had a folder with an archive of all the billboard top 100 albums. I think that was the top swedish site (bbs?) or maybe chiplips which I believe was hungarian. There were a couple good ones in US (MIT/RIT) but the others were in sweden, hungary, netherlands. I think one in France.
It was interesting to see how those groups and topsites were chased and shut down, but the P2P platforms that came out made it impossible to shut down anyway.
I ripped a lot of DVDs in the 2000s, even had a few pre-release. One of our group committed suicide, I forget how we found out, someone outside the group knew him IRL i think. There is an NFO with a tribute out there somewhere.
Writing some tools for doing releases got me into Python.
Reminds me of when we were writing subtitles in Portuguese for pirated US only to see the fan subs copied verbatim on the actual cable channels months later, when episodes would finally get released in Brazil
Ooh, as a pre-teen of An Early Post-Soviet Country, I remember how puzzled I was as to what the hell that message and the files with those curly logos in the folders of most of my pirated DOS games actually mean. A paper dictionary lookup (razor = "habemeajaja" or "raseerija" or "žiletitera" in Estonian) didn't help either. Also, in our language, "warez" rhymes with "vares" [v-uh-res], which typically stands for "hooded crow" (corvus cornix), so... this + 1911... uh... that didn't make sense either.
As a boy really into drawing, I was seriously impressed by that ASCII art, though. It is surely a big part of why I still find the DOS/ASCII aesthetic the most pleasurable in terms of computer graphics and GUIs.
Muhahaaaa this thread full of people mentioning .nfo files. You guys are ten years late at least! Razor 1911 was a C64 an Amiga group way before the PC scene was a thing [1]
[1] My crew and I made ex aequo first place at a PC demo-compo in Sweden/Uppsala, tied with Future Crew, before Future Crew became a thing so believe me I know about the PC scene being late to the game ; )
> On April 22, 2011, Razor 1911's demo division won the public choice award[7] during the Scene.org Awards ceremony at The Gathering for their 64k intro "Insert No Coins" coded by Rez with music from Dubmood.[8]
I can still remember plugging my USB Robotics 14.4k modem in for the first time. We could transfer 1 megabyte in 5 1/2 minutes!!
Thanks for the memories.
Here's a shout out to all those who read 2600 magazine and tried to hack their local PBXs so that they could call some TDT support board, internationally.
Side note, I have and will continue to pronounce "Warez" like the Mexican city Juarez. I know it's wrong, but I read the word years before I heard someone pronounce it and it's stuck in my head that way.
I remember RZR, FLT and DRG.
There was also a group doing rips where they took out all alternate language audio, re-compressed cutscenes, and then repacked the whole came with uHARC, turning 9.4GB downloads into 5GB, maybe even less. I had a good internet connection already at that time, but I imagine for people in countries with bad internet (<2020s American internet for example) it must have been magical.
I learnt to code primarily by writing IRC bots for these groups + wrote an auto-trading FXP client in C++ that looked for pres dropping in top site channels, and automatically FXP couriered to other topsites.
I wish I'd know back then (13 years old) what I know now (39) in terms of even simple things like linked lists, linear programming, estimators, etc, could have dominated.
The "hardcore" in the scene would actually set up shell boxes and write a bunch of shell scripts to do auto trading. That also piqued my interest in learning Linux and Bash scripting.
Ah, Razor. Sadly it seems that DRM companies like Irdeto, makers of Denuvo, are now simply hiring talented crackers such that there are very few people now able to crack games beyond simple DRM. Empress is the only one remaining.
There are still more talented crackers in the wild, emulators still getting worked on, new DRMs being defeated, denuvo is the exception. Sadly you can't expect people to work a month+ for free for cracking games with arguably less quality every year.
Also a pet theory of mine is that teenagers (the ones with actually free time) currently tend to pick these skills less often, more computer and internet access but tons more of cheap entertainment and a steeper learning curve.
Who knows what I would have learned if I had TikTok, Instagram and infinite free/cheap games when growing up.
> Sadly you can't expect people to work a month+ for free for cracking games with arguably less quality every year.
True, at least one solace is that Denuvo is now a time-restricted SaaS, so if a game is old enough, Denuvo is often removed as the license duration has passed. So at the very least, we are still getting DRM-free games, we just have to become /r/patientgamers, a great sub by the way for these kinds of discussions on older games.
> Also a pet theory of mine is that teenagers (the ones with actually free time) currently tend to pick these skills less often
I've noticed this too, apparently lots of Gen Z don't know what a file system is as they only ever grew up with tablets and phones which don't expose these (usually iOS, while Android does to some extent).
I have vivid memories of reopening game installers from CLASS, long after installing, just so I could keep listening to the music. This one by Maktone still pops into my head from time to time, almost 25 years on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NjxgaZtHqA
Myself and some of the original #warez folks on EFNet still hang out on a non-IRC chat platform, 30+ years later. Some of those guys were Razor members at one point in time. Lol most have grown up kids now. It's definitely a far cry from back in the day. I was briefly a courier for Razor starting on BBS but they were quite demanding. I would courier releases from their HQ at the time Mirage to a number of the member boards, but they wanted things done like the second it hit and really wanted all their couriers to have multiple lines. Certainly some colorful fellows in Razor 1911 like the TRC.
They had an incredible capacity to compress large games... as a broke person with ~1MB/s ADSL, it was the only reason I was able to pirate GTA IV back in the day. They really thought about the common gamer...
I used to sell copies of pirated games on tapes and 5.25" floppies for the C64 in the 80's in a third world country. Made some good money as a teenager. I predate most people here. It was very hard to get these games in the country. Used snail mail which took weeks. I remember Hotline, Fairlight and many other cracking groups. Trainers at the beginning of the games were cool. Also remember the Freezeframe and Expert cartridges that freeze a games and enable you to save it.
Another group to mention is Knights Of Doom. Bunch of high school kids from Turkiye, they were rebranding already existing cracks/warez releases. One of the innovation that they brought to the scene was self-typed serial number boxes. So, you insert a CD to setup a game for example, you go through installer and then you realise serial number is already typed in. They even had their own forum so.
I remember a certain Skyrim installer that was created by them. The progress bar would only update every 25%, and on my slow PC, it felt like an eternity waiting for the game to install. Also, if I recall correctly, the installer didn't create a desktop shortcut, so you had to hunt down where the game was installed. Those were certainly some memorable times.
I wouldn't say _technical_ but some of the recent ones have Empress and Skidrow feuding and there's some dialog about the peripherals of how the cracks are made (in between the slurs and personal attacks). For example https://i.redd.it/p3s5d14i7hib1.jpg
Great memories of spending all my time on IRC and hunting for Photoshop when it was just a desktop app. Untold hours spent in college while procrastinating for my next exam.
brings back memories https://ghuntley.com/under-suspicion/ the person who taught me how to program ran the r1911 botnet and was taken down in operation buccaneer.
