no-CD patches for games

[MarkG]

Tuberski, there IS a no-cd patch provided from Infogrames. that's the legal way to do things in your example

zulu9812, you know, good friends happen to borrow to their friends the games they bought legally...

[Ming]

Originally posted by zulu9812
If you want one, you've obviously installed from the CD and thus have the game legally anyway.

Or maybe you just "borrowed" the game from your buddy... and decided to install it on your machine as well... and your friend's machine... and his friend's machine... and his friend's machine...

[Sonic]

MarkG, not every company also likes mods. I know the story (from The Sims boards), where some guy was creating a mod for The Sims (I don't remember everything correctly and what that mod was supposed to patch, but it wasn't some pirating thing, it had something to do with furniture I believe) and later he received an e-mail from EA, in which he was told to stop creating the mod and deleting everything from his computer if he don't want legal action to be taken. He posted that e-mail on forums (thesimsresource.com), some people told him that this was probably just a poor joke by some guy, not true EA official e-mail. However, as later e-mails showed to him, this was true EA official e-mail and he was forced to stop creating his mod.
So, not every company likes mods. Does that means mods should be also illegal unless you request permition from company to create them? However, I don't think permission requests would be more than a waste of time for both companies and modders. Also some busy companies might just not answer such requests.

[MarkG]

Sonic, of course it doesnt apply in all cases. We also had the case of the german translation mod for civ3 against which Infogrames took legal action

But apart from that incident, all the companies related to the games we cover have been supportive to mods.

[Rasbelin]

Originally posted by Ming

To answer that question...

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?threadid=60795

Looks like I haven't been enough around in the OTF lately. Thanks, Ming!

Poor Greeks... How civilised; or more like Civilized.

[Skanky Burns]

I can understand Markos' point of view on this. The companies involved with the game view no-cd patches as a lost source of revenue, despite the majority of the time it being used by legal owners.

However, that won't stop me getting no-cd patches for every single game I own. Nothing frustrated me more with my first computer than to "Please insert disk 17" each time you got to a different section of the game. I thought harddrives solved that problem for good, but alas. So no cd-swapping for me.

[MrWhereItsAt]

So, can anyone tell me where to get the No-CD patch for....

Makes me wonder what happens if the copy-protection for a game means it doesn't work at all with your CD-ROM drive. If you rang the helpline for that game, what do they tell you? "You should have checked all the supported CD-ROM drives before buying the game?" Like they are written on the box. Or is it "Fork out a wad of cash for a new CDROM drive"?

Does anyone know how they deal with these problems?

[Rasbelin]

Originally posted by MrWhereItsAt
So, can anyone tell me where to get the No-CD patch for....

I'll help you in a perfectly legal way. Type in the magical words and voilá. Hint: use the two first words in the thread title.

Markos,

if you don't like that search form, just remove it, but please don't take any further action.

[Skanky Burns]

Does anyone know how they deal with these problems?

I think a few weeks after they receive the first complaints, they release the no-cd patch. You have to register with them to get it though, to ensure you don't have a pirate copy. Or someone regsitering their friends copy.

[MarkG]

well this thread has certainly taken a different route now

bye bye thread