• leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    5·
    3 days ago

    Meh, burning CDs… ever had to worry whether you’d parked your hard drive’s heads before moving it, child…?

    (To be fair, neither did I, probably; my earliest hard drive was already IDE, I believe, and those seem to have already had autopark, but the old lore was that you parked your hard drives before moving them, or the heads would scratch the surface, so park them we did.)

    • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      ever had to worry whether you’d parked your hard drive’s heads before moving it, child…?

      Yes, also you parked it before shutting down the system every time. Once the hard drive was powered down, the heads would just crash into the platters. While not instantly fatal, it wasn’t good for the drive. So, you’d park the drive before flipping the power switch.

  • rozodru@lemmy.world
    6·
    4 days ago

    I had a program that came with special CD Labels for the printer where you could make your own cool CD label covers. that was fun.

    Or going into a Dreamcast IRC channel to download games and burn them to disk. I think I only ever actually bought like 2 Dreamcast games, Shenmue and Seaman, the rest were just burned to CD-Rs.

      • Redkey@programming.dev
        1·
        3 days ago

        The PlayStation 1 had a copy protection system that measured physical properties of the disc which couldn’t be replicated by normal CD writers. There were a few ways to get around this, but to be able to put a burned CD into your console and boot directly from it into the game (as usual) required the installation of a fairly complex mod chip. A lot of people alternatively used the “swap trick”, which is how I used to play my imported original games.

        The DreamCast’s copy protection was heavily reliant on using dual-layer GD-ROM discs rather than regular CDs, even though they look the same to the naked eye. There were other checks in place as well, but simply using GD-ROMs was pretty effective in and of itself.

        Unfortunately, Sega also added support for a thing called “MIL-CD” to the DreamCast. MIL-CD was intended to allow regular music CDs to include interactive multimedia components when played on the console. However, MIL-CD was supported for otherwise completely standard CDs, including burned CDs, and had no copy protection, because Sega wanted to make it as easy as possible for other companies to make MIL-CDs, so the format could spread and hopefully become popular. Someone found a way to “break out” of the MIL-CD system and take over the console to run arbitrary code like a regular, officially released game, and that was the end of DreamCast’s copy protection. People couldn’t just copy an original game disc 1:1 and have it work; some work had to be done on the game to put it on a burned CD and still have it run (sometimes quite a lot of work, actually), but no console modification was needed. Anyone with a DreamCast relased before Sega patched this issue (which seems to be most of them) can simply burn a CD and play it on their console, provided they can get a cracked copy of the game.

      • rozodru@lemmy.world
        1·
        3 days ago

        For the DC? yeah, it would play burned CDs no problem.

        For the playstation? not sure. I had mine modded so I could import games from Japan but I don’t believe it could play burned CDs.

        Xbox and the 360 were easy to mod though and you could play burned games on those also.

        But yeah the Dreamcast just did it right out of the box. no mods required.

  • midori matcha@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    “We first had to venture miles deep into the woods to find a local Circuit City, which bountifully bore free trial AOL CDs like fruit. We then grabbed an armful, despite the protests of the clerk, and hastily returned to camp. We then had to build a fire by hand, with kindling and wood, and we donned our robes. As the fire grew, we meditated and chanted around the fire, as we mentally mounted the Serious Sam bootleg install files. It took weeks to and a several acres of wood to chant the correct order of ones and zeroes, so we had to work in teams and take shifts. When it was my turn, I took a CD and stuck it through a metal stick stuck into the fire. I spun the CD with my bare hands, blistered and swollen by fiery praying, and lowered it into the fire to burn the ones, and raised it slightly for the zeroes. Any error found by the final validation step would result in premature cremation by the group. There were not many of us left by the time we had the LAN party. A room full of Pentium 4 PCs made the room feel as hot as a furnace, but the pizzas were cold that day, little ones. So cold…”

  • A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
    3·
    4 days ago

    …and for a while it was fairly normal to refer to writing bootable USB sticks as “burning” as well.

    Now I don’t say that anymore because I don’t want to sound like a boomer, or - worse - I don’t want people to take me at my word or think I’m just plain mad.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      I always somehow thought the distinction of “burning” a USB thumb drive was adding an MBR or setting something that ordinary file writes don’t do.