Who here remembers needing to have the CD in the computer ev

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I remember this, I also remember how happy I was to finally have an HD large enough I could keep images of my favourite games on the hard drive to run as a virtual CD/DVD drive.

I also remember no-CD hacks and similar.

I also remember Diablo yelling at me that I couldn't install it if I didn't have a Pentium 90 or higher, but it would then proceed to install and ran fine on my overclocked 486DX/2 66 (pushing 120 or 133 MHz before I retired it).

The absolute worst of this is PS4 games (maybe Xbox One too?) requiring the disk in the system despite installing the entire game to the hard drive. I suppose the disk check is necessary for people who want to take the disk to a friend's console without allowing them to essentially pirate the game. Still, hard drive reads are so much faster than Blu-ray reads, so it makes a lot of sense to require a drive for a better baseline to work with.

One BIG problem is that developers take the Blu-ray capacity for granted and will fill their games with pre-rendered in-engine videos to mask loading times and/or reduce QA time spent. As a result games come in at huge sizes. Recently I downloaded a 40GB game that unpacked to 60GB on the drive. Idtech games are infamous for being massive on account of megatextures: DOOM is 78GB on the disk. It definitely adds up, my 3TB drive is practically full from games alone.

Still. I don't have any fond memories of installing off the disk, inputting keys, downloading patches from third-party sites with queues for downloads...

My husband and I still laugh about the time I told him that if he kept playing EverQuest that day I was going to "whip the disc out the window" because I didn't know it didn't need the disc/was on the hard drive. We had been dating for a year or less and I didn't want to compete with a game, no matter how cool it was. I have always been a gamer but the dawn of online RPGs was something altogether different than my console gaming.
The only logical solution was for me to starting playing too.

Does Everquest even exist, now, as a thing you can play online? Everquest 2 seems like some ancient thing at this point (and to be fair, it barely deserved to exist in the first place)

Disks are the worst, and digital distribution is a superior system. It's a shame, though, that the system is tied to publishers and companies like Valve who make all of their money from the system. Remember when Valve made games?

Relatively ethical distributors like GOG are a start, but I feel like a co-operative distributor should be the future.

Yep. You can play it for free* now.

There are also fan-run servers. I tried playing one for a little bit that tries to recreate the game from 1999 or so, but I'm quite certain that it isn't the game for me.

Pfft. I've been using CD-Cracks since 2001. I ain't puttin' no disk in the drive every time. F-that. That just means every time you put it in, you have a chance of scratching the CD every time. No thanks. Daemon Tools has been around since 1998, been using it ever since. The whole needing a cd in the drive was just some foolish anti-piracy thing that never truly worked because people just used cracks. Not to mention so many people just torrent most of them anyway, it's no surprise CD's are becoming obsolete now. Even though I prefer having the CD than having a digital download (it just takes up space and I'm not re-downloading it over & over) and I'd just keep the cd in the case while I installed a crack.

I vaguely remember my dad using cassette tapes for programming before the floppy disks were out.

Remember? I have such a game (Roller Coaster Tycoon 2) in my desktops disc drive right now.

I do! Loved doing that as a kid. I had a book of games that you could programme and then play. I miss doing that sometimes.

I never played comp games much but I remember that problem. I sometimes copied the CD onto my hardrive & then created a virtual DVD drive & put the game onto that so I wouldn't need to insert the disk to play the game.

I lost a lot of CDs.

That's how GoG does it >_< It's kind of messy though, I'd rather just burn a disc and keep my HDD clean(er).

Ah, a fellow ST man. I still use an ST to this day (4MB STe) with a hard drive emulator and an SD card full of hard disk adapted games.

I remember waiting about 40 minutes for The Hobbit to load on cassette on the C64 and then having exactly the same gaming experience every time I played it (never could escape those bulbous eyes on the forest road). Still, if I could get hold of that game on an emulator I would happily play it.

I remember and miss those days. DOS was my best friend at the time!

I had an Amiga when I was a kid and one of my favourite games had something like 14 floppy disks. You get quite far in the story and it'd go something like this;

'Insert Disk 6'
*inserts disk 6*
'Insert Disk 4'
*inserts disk 4*
'Insert Disk 1'
*inserts disk 1*
'Insert Disk 2'
*inserts disk 2*
'Insert Disk 6'
*inserts disk 6*
'Disk Not Recognised. Please Insert Disk 6'

AAAAAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!! !