NSFW.

It's been proven that people who pirate also buy more media than those who don't.

Besides, if I was never going to buy it in the first place because you're charging too much, you've lost nothing if I pirate your product.

A victimless crime.

We were always doing this kind of thing on these platforms. This is how we used to hack copy protection out of games.

Stepping through, line by line, editing the code and adding JMPs to get around the copy protection code after loading the magic numbers into the register...

Happy, happy times.

Then they started loading the protection code from disk doing tricky things. One I cracked recently was a pair of Commodore 1541 sectors that appeared to be the same logical sector (because the drive head is blind). It needed to hit both of them to compile the next portion of the loader. Naturally the segment up to that point was encrypted as well, but nothing survives a VICE breakpoint. https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2023/08/cracking-designwares-gra...

Obviously this is nothing on things like V-MAX! and Rapidlok which even nowadays have variations that are tough to remaster.

That's beautiful.

That's how I first learned assembly. Armed with a monitor program that can disassemble and modify memory, I read and modified programs stepping through them. Mostly games, naturally. I never got an actual assembler/linker chain that would work and useful software was hard to come by.

I don't want ads on my fridge and I don't need to explain why.

I miss Bolt Thrower. They're from my home town.

That is without doubt the funniest AI generated series of messages I have ever read.

Nearly as good as my resource booking API integration that claimed that Harry Potter, Gordon the Gecko and Hermione Granger were on site and using our meeting rooms.

Please tell me that thing boots to Workbench

I switched to Slackware in the early oughts, but gaming was hit and miss at best with Wine. The occasional native game (like Neverwinter Nights) was always welcome.

I've dual booted to game for the last seven or eight years because of coworkers and family nagging me to play games with them, but now I don't need to. I haven't come across a game that won't run flawlessly on Linux (through Steam) for a couple of years now. I can enjoy my nightly game of Deep Rock Galactic or Necesse without being part of the botnet.

No further requirement to run Windows!

To be fair you haven't had a great deal of respect for the last forty years or so.

What you mistook for respect was fear.

As a person who grew up in Poland.

In the 80s and 90s USA was idolized and admired. Yes, even in the 80s when officially Poland was still in a soviet influence sphere with soviet and communist propaganda being everywhere.

The word "Ameryka" was a colloquial used to describe something amazing, rich, high tech. The myth of American freedom, that in America hard work can lead to personal eneichment were told like fairy tales.

When Poland joined NATO it was like dream come true. There was this huge enthusiasm of becoming officially friends and allies of USA.

We looked up so much to the USA.

It's really sad to see that completely disappear.

What’s wrong with it? It’s a great word

You need to read the classics.

That says more about you than the site.

Not really, I have an excellent vocabulary, I'm just averse to those who neglect to eschew obfuscation.