Burning cds!
I was trying to burn a copy of a game from my friend. It failed over and over. Eventually it succeeded and I was able to play return to castle wolfeinstein.
Not sure if it failed due to copy protection or whatever, but I played that game a bunch back in the day. In more recent years I just bought it for like $1
There were lots of variables to ensure a good cd was burned correctly. Quality of the burner, the quality of cds (from having used hundreds of them, they really had varying qualities) and a big one was the speed of the burn. Lot’s of cds did not work for me when the burning speed was too high, for a good one to happen it had to be done in low speed. Also software to burn them sometimes fucked things up, I remember a time when Nero was destroying a bunch of my cds.
And then the copy protections of some influenced many copies, some made it very difficult. But at least we had cracks and all the warez around. Good times.
Early burners if you touched the desk even slightly that little bump would cause the burn to fail. Also you had to stop every other program from running. Screen saver kicked in … enjoy your new coaster… You just had a buffer underrun while trying to render some flying toasters.
Burning disks was failing because of the PC’s inability to keep the bufferr full all the time in the rate that the disk was spinning. You were selecting write speed. Let’s say 24x. If you started doing something else on the PC and it prioritized that, it could reach to a point that it didn’t have available in the buffer memory the next set of data to be written. The disk writer couldn’t dynamically reduce the speed of spinning. So it ended up having nothing to write at said position. Then it could not resume. It all should happen in one go.
How about walking home with a VHS tape and nothing to hide it with. The “movie”: Debbie does Dallas.
Timing your family leaving the house so you could watch a “movie” in the loungeroom.
Kids today with their own portable devices in their bedrooms have no idea how risky it was for us.
I believe this explains why a lot of us have developed tinitis. Experts point to headphones and loud music as the cause but I theorise that out of shear survival instinct we had to develop super sensitive hearing and the ability to separate the smooth sounds of a saxophone and moaning with the distant sound of a car door or car tires pulling into a gravel driveway
Ah, the good old times when I had to find and commission someone with a CD burner to copy Red Alert for me…
I was a bit before that, my group of friends liberally shared 5 1/4" floppies with C64 games on them. I also remember a demo being passed around where someone (not one of my friends) managed to encode about 10 scratchy seconds of “Why can’t this be love?” by Van Halen onto a 360K floppy disk and it was amazing at the time.
As far as C64 goes, when I was young there were radio broadcasts with C64 games. You’d record them on tape and then put that in the comodore…
Nah CDs were too expensive. It was Zip Disks or Floppies all the way
My family had a zip drive growing up. Then again, my dad is a doctor, so our income might have had something to do with it.
I have tons of working zip disks.
But an cdr burner in the 90s were expensive
This is more 00’s. Mid-00’s it was DVDs full of homework lol
