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- Hacker News
- Man, those CompUSA and Computer City pictures take me back. Spent too much time there (when the 7300 was my regular Mac, the CompUSA "Apple store" was my primary source of software). Probably still have some of those free Computer City floppies in a drawer somewhere.
- It was fun to just browse. As least as a kid it wasby tetrisgm
- I worked the parts counter in 98-99. It was a coveted position, as the juice was the retail channel programs where qualified employees got pretty significant discounts from Intel, AMD, and the likes. Reps would also shower you with free or discounted stuff, I recall having a good friendship with a Creative Labs who rigged contests and gave away shit constantly. Lots of free software to be had as well. It was effective though because I happily and aggressively shilled for the companies hooking me up. CompUSA was actually a pretty miserable place to work but it fed MY insatiable hunger for new hardware.by moribvndvs
- I remember Microsoft had a time limited version of Office on cd-rom that was sold for a couple bucks at Kinko's. You could replace a .dll in it and that removed the time limit.by zf00002
- There was something similar (but I can't recall what) where you just set your clock far in the future (like 2010!) and then the trial would last that long + one month.by bombcar
- From the title I was expecting this to be about them packing 700MB of data on the CD, a common thing at the time by spacing the tracks slightly closer together, as some CD-Rs did.by gblargg
- This is hacker news, not packer news. What are you, some sort of Green Bay fan?by ChoGGi
- Surprised that it's not mentioned that the CD was also an audio CD with the Quake soundtrack..! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_(soundtrack)
"Originally pressed on the same disc as the game, Quake was otherwise commercially unavailable until its release on vinyl in September 2020"
Soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbLttdCOgCM
by gregsadetsky - It was actually reasonably common around the mid 90's for game CDs to have their music as audio tracks on the CD.
I guess there was a point when CD-ROM was the target format anyway but game content hadn't necessarily grown to fill it yet. Having the CD drive play the audio directly (it could be directly connected to the sound card) with no decompression or software processing required probably saved some CPU cycles as well.
I think at least half a dozen games I had around the time did that. Of course most of the soundtracks wouldn't be interesting enough on their own.
by Delk - How would the challenge/serial have worked if implemented correctly?
Since the challenge rotate every 5 minutes, there must be some way for a user to enter against an old challenge, right? Else they call, get a code and nothing.
But even with that out of the way, the decryption key must be the same across all discs, since there is only 1 master disc.
So the challenge/serial must combine to create a decryption key, which can be shared across users.
by wodenokoto - As soon as I saw "Quake Shareware" in the title of this post, I thought "Pray to the one you will pay!" which was what appeared on the screen when you ran QCRACK.
I always wondered why Final Doom didn't unlock with QCRACK - I always assumed it was a bug with the keygen, never realized it wasn't possible to purchase it from the disk at all!
by jasongill - You can actually unlock Final DOOM from qcrack. But you need to use `-g` to give the codename of the game[1] because sku.17 won't give it away.
1. https://rmolina-co.blogspot.com/2016/08/qcrack-y-la-belleza-...
- > By June 1996, after three years of hard work, id Software had completed their next title, Quake. As for their previous title, they were going to release both a shareware version and a full version of their game. Since it used a mere 22 MiB of storage, people at id Software had the idea of leveraging the remaining capacity of a CD-ROM. Why not include encrypted versions of the full id catalogue of games? Not only this would cut out the middlemen, it would give instant access to gamers with a simple phone call and a credit card.
That wasn't a new idea at the time. In 1994 Apple distributed a "software store" CD-ROM called Software Dispatch that implemented the same idea: https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/apple-software-dispatch-from-1.... The thing was full of demos, and if you wanted to buy the full version, you just had to call some number to get an unlock code.
I think I had at least one other CD-ROM that implemented the same concept. I'm sure there were tons of others.
by palmotea - > The packaging was actually pretty high quality for a shareware product. On my copy, a sticker on the front clarifies this is the "Shareware version" with instructions to call 1-800-669-9342 (or 1-800-ID-GAMES) to unlock the full game.
> The phone number is still active today. However you don't reach the unlock center since CompUSA went out of business. The Superstore chain closed between 2007 and 2008. Instead of an unlock operator we get an automated message to sell us elderly stuff.
I remember how stuff like that presented an insurmountable obstacle as a kid. Buying stuff in the store, sure, but calling phone numbers or writing letters to companies? No way.
I like how it has come full circle today, with the phone number being inaccessible once again...
by xg15 - It’s worth getting the Quake shareware disc for the NIN soundtrack. Official track names are now available following the vinyl release a few years ago. This is the only CD release of the soundtrack. Just don’t forget to skip track 1.by jonhohle
- NIN and iD (re-?)released a vinyl record set for the 30th anniversary a couple weeks ago.by hadlock
- I remember I had the CD but rarely used it because having to pop in the CD just to play the game was annoying. So, I mostly played it without the sound track. Also, I never was that much into nine inch nails. Just not my genre. But my memory of the game is that it was fine without music.
- Mind that every Quake release includes the same soundtrack, it's not just the shareware version ;)
There's millions of such CDs in the wild, both shareware and fully purchased copies.
by chungy - The data track never sounds very good. A little too industrial for my tastes.by doubled112
- > Just don’t forget to skip track 1.
There is very slightly more to it than just the mixed-mode sessions: the audio tracks on the Quake CD were mastered with pre-emphasis, so your ripper or player needs to apply corresponding de-emphasis EQ in order for them to sound correct. 1996 was actually a strangely late year to find any CD mastered with pre-emph; it was mostly an '80s thing: https://www.studio-nibble.com/cd/index.php?title=Pre-emphasi...
On top of being a technique that had fallen out of common use by that time, Quake has the pre-emphasis metadata flagged in the subcodes but not flagged in the TOC, so some software players/rippers like (annoyingly) Exact Audio Copy won't heed it: https://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Comparison_of...
Here's a side-by-side comparison — my EAC rip of my MacSoft version of Quake (left) alongside the output of `sox_ng deemph` for the same file (right): https://i.ibb.co/9m18CSsk/Emi-2026-08-17-18-52-48.png
And if you're curious, here's the pre-emphasis subcode channel Q flag and pre-emphasis frequency response as described in the Red Book standard, and sox_ng's code for undoing it:
― https://audio-union.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Red-Book-...
― https://audio-union.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Red-Book-...
― https://codeberg.org/sox_ng/sox_ng/src/branch/main/src/deemp...
Although if someone has been unknowingly listening to the pre-emphasized tracks for thirty years, maybe the ‘incorrect’ one is what sounds right to them? :)
by Lammy - "The CD was announced[4] on July 3, 1996 and released on August 30th[5]. The hacker group GNOMON released Quakecrk.zip only 39 days later[6]."
While not being familiar with the Windows side of things, I did frequent the a.b.m.a newsgroup being a broke student. It was always impressive to me to see how quickly someone would post a binary before the crack was posted. I remember one app I was very interested in posting on Friday, and the crack available when I checked back on Monday. Even apps that needed a physical dongle for the ADB port were cracked and not just the apps that needed a key typed in to unlock. Later, the apps that would clone a USB dongle came along, and one software company that used USB dongles actually advised using this tool when we started running their software on Blade servers that did not support adding 24 USB devices.
by dylan604 - I remember old games shipping with huge lists of codes on paper. Paper made, on purpose, too big for an US legal/A4 photocopier. And moreover the codes would be using "light blue characters on slightly less light blue paper". Very annoying for casual piracy (as in: copying your neighbor's version of the game).
> Later, the apps that would clone a USB dongle came along, and one software company that used USB dongles actually advised using this tool when we started running their software on Blade servers that did not support adding 24 USB devices.
That's a good one!
- And when the crack came out on the same day as the CD release it was called a zero-day. A term that has long since lost ita original meaning, in fact it has been inverted.by dingaling
- I did reverse engineering as a hobby in my teens. The method for 90% of cracks back in the day boiled down to:
1. Launch the app.
2. Trigger the "not registered" screen.
3. Search for the string in the binary.
4. Search for code that references the location of the string and squint hard until you spot the "check if CD-key is valid" section.
5. Patch the final opcode from "jnz" to "jz". If you felt fancy, reverse engineer the checking algorithm to create a keygen instead of a patch.
Anticracking methods became mainstream in the late 90s, but they weren't very sophisticated and most amounted to obfuscation.
Long live +ORC, +Fravia and CracksLatinos.
by kaoD - I did exactly this thing when I was a broke teenager. The files in my ID1 directory that I shuffle around from computer to computer to this day came from that disc 30 years ago. (I still have the disc, but not the case.) I did, however, purchase Quake II and III when they were released. And many years later bought Quake on Steam. I think they got their money's worth from me after all.
(There were some who believed that making the shareware disc easily-crackable was an intentional stroke of genius. It got people who couldn't afford the full retail version to buy the game and expand its popularity. The argument being that $10 was a fairly ludicrous amount of money to pay for a single shareware game. Shareware CDs tended to be $5 on the high end, or free with most computer/gaming magazines.)
by bityard - This strategy makes sense in developing markets. People might be too poor to buy your game right now so you distribute it for free hoping that in the future they will get rich and then they'll actually buy your newer game.by anal_reactor
- Glad I am not the only one who carts an id1 directory around. Mine originally came from a retail disk with a funny story, I had bought it for a friend. a birthday present. and a couple years later I bought their old pc from them and that quake disk was in the box of parts. It had came back me.by somat
- > There were some who believed that making the shareware disc easily-crackable was an intentional stroke of genius.
I doubt it. I would believe that the id guys weren't too choked about the lost revenue after the fact, but the business guys probably believed the scheme would work (especially since they contracted a company that said "yes, this will work").
Aside from that, the shareware cd was incredible marketing - the digipak cd case was the kind of art and paper construction that nin was using on their discs (like the Broken EP), and the disc itself has nice art with the four logos in cardinal directions. I bought a copy of the registered disc from ebay years later and it's in a jewel case with really crappy artwork vs the shareware version, it was a surprising disappointment.
by mewse-hn - "For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). "
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The title that made me go out and buy a CD-ROM drive was "Wing Commander III", released during the holidays of 1994, a year and a half before Quake 1. This was peak "Silliwood", when games started to use FMV cut-scenes starring bankable actors like Mark Hamill. Games were still being released for the SNES at this point, so imagine the contrast!
In the age before wikipedia or ubiquitous internet access, it was also pretty amazing to have access to a multimedia enhanced encyclopedia. Storing large amounts of data was still a tricky thing. It would take a few years for CD-R's to arrive, and there would be a plethora of competing technologies like Zip drives. Looking back, it seems like computer technology was moving especially fast in the 90's.
by beloch - Ripper (1996) with Christopher Walken and Paul Giamatti came on 6 CDsby NopIdoN