Amiga Crackers

[Franko]

I've always prefer to buy stuff whether it be games, CDs, DVDs or whatever, as to me having the original box/case/manuals are all part of collecting things...

Is still do with CDs, DVDs and SNES games, but at one point while I was still married the missus said enough... as I had more original games than any of the local shops had and so they all had to be archived in ADF or DMS and my prized boxes had to go (big mistake really, as I got rid of the wife just a year later...)

But to be honest back then it was actually easier for me to nip up the Barras and buy cracked/pirated games that I didn't have to bother trying to crack them myself in order to turn them into ADFs or DMS files...

So I'm not sure where I stand on this one, if I had kept all the original boxes then I would need a bigger house and now everything is safely stored and archived on HDs and DVDs and is a whole lot easier to access...

Odd thing is I will never part with my CD, DVD, or SNES collection even though these can easily be obtained in pirate form, but then even the total amount of them comes nowhere near the space that my original Amiga games took up...

[tone007]

I've got a nice Intellivision collection, something like 60 games in boxes with overlays and manuals.  I never play them, though!

[Kesa]

Wouldn't it be cool if we could pirate actual Amiga's. Those things cost a fortune back when you were 5 or 10 years old     :rolleyes:

Lucky for me and my brother our dad bought us one "for school work"    

[Retro_71]

Piracy is all blow out of proportion while I still  get cracked stuff even for Pc's i have alot of original software and it's come to a point if a software house release a game/program that requires quite a few "upgrade" i.e. bug fixes then i would rather pirate it. People have been conned into thinking its ok to pay money for a game/app that isn't finished or has bugs in it.. IE look at windows how many security and other upgrades do you get per week (don't get me wrong i liked XP and love win 7 BUT come on..... )

P.s. I actually have a large Steam account and so does my oldest son so i have paid for games that i think are worth it.

[Digiman]

Back in the day, piracy meant I had lots of games.

.....


Never bought the "piracy killed the amiga" argument though. The problem was with Commodore's management, not with people copying some games.

Hmmm no the problem was with quality of the many many terrible arcade conversions @ £25 on shop shelves like Outrun. We ALL knew something close to arcade perfect was possible for just about every game of the 80s arcade but we got shit on constantly with lousy conversions written by incompetent coders.

I ONLY bought quality products that were obviously using a high degree of the power of OCS....the rest got pirated. The only people who lost out were the software companies peddling their badly coded ST ports for £5 extra. IF all games were written with the same level of skill as Beast, Lotus II or Stardust then they would get my money. The rest of the potential sales died a horrible death at the hands of my X-Copy disk AND I AM PROUD OF THAT.

I bought Gauntlet 1, I pirated Gauntlet 2. It's that simple.

Amiga disappeared from shop shelves as a product to buy thanks to Commodore yes, but software houses crying wolf over piracy levels and hence validating their decision to abandon the format only have themselves to blame in general. If lack of software, due to piracy, killed the Amiga then ultimately all those crappy pathetically programmed games we had to suffer (like 90% of Amiga conversions) by software houses is the cause. Depends what you mean.

So I chose pancakes due to complexity of the issue (the American style ones, with maple syrup to be precise :roflmao:)

[Digiman]

Piracy is all blow out of proportion while I still  get cracked stuff even for Pc's i have alot of original software and it's come to a point if a software house release a game/program that requires quite a few "upgrade" i.e. bug fixes then i would rather pirate it. People have been conned into thinking its ok to pay money for a game/app that isn't finished or has bugs in it.. IE look at windows how many security and other upgrades do you get per week (don't get me wrong i liked XP and love win 7 BUT come on..... )

P.s. I actually have a large Steam account and so does my oldest son so i have paid for games that i think are worth it.

If a PC game requires me to be connected to the internet to play games off-line or other stupid copy protection routines then out of principle I will not pay for it. If they treat my like scum by assumption then I might as well pirate it anyway (not that I need PC games, got every console ever released in the UK since 1970s anyway )

[Digiman]

I've got a nice Intellivision collection, something like 60 games in boxes with overlays and manuals.  I never play them, though!

The only reason you keep them is because they are worth bugger all on ebay :roflmao:

[Franko]

@ Digiman

Hmmm... don't recall buying many Amiga games at £25, most were priced between £10 to £15 as far as I recall, many ST ports were lousy indeed and yes it was Commodore who were responsible for the Amigas downfall...

But most Amiga games were not conversions from other platform the truth is the exact opposite, sure there were many badly written original Amiga games, but like most folk when you saw them on display in the shop you simply didn't buy them and just paid a visit to your friendly neighbourhood cracking group instead...

When all is said and done however, it doesn't really matter anymore, it's all history now and is now nothing more than all us Amiga nutters having something to talk about and keeping the Amiga forums alive... whether that a good or bad thing I'm not quite sure...

[Retro_71]

If a PC game requires me to be connected to the internet to play games off-line or other stupid copy protection routines then out of principle I will not pay for it. If they treat my like scum by assumption then I might as well pirate it anyway (not that I need PC games, got every console ever released in the UK since 1970s anyway )

LOL i too love to pirate those silling games and i can't agree more the fact that i didn't pay one sec for mine and my sons games has alot to do with it (my brother just gives them to me... and to my son).
But it true you pay lots of money and they treat you like crap also the constant updating (even so far as to download the whole games again) is very very annoying.

[Tension]

Commodore were making money off the hardware sales.  Why would free software hurt Commodore?  For companies that lose money on hardware, the situation is a lot more serious.

Piracy helped the Amiga.  There's no two ways about it.

Software houses left the Amiga because the chips were weak, not because of piracy.

50% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

[tone007]

The only reason you keep them is because they are worth bugger all on ebay :roflmao:

Never really looked, but now that I have they seem to be worth more than Amiga games as a rule.  Probably doesn't hurt that they'll generally work after decades of storage unlike floppies.

I've got two copes of this I might as well put up.  http://cgi.ebay.com/Fathom-Imagic-Intellivision-Game-Complete-/320636372100?pt=Video_Games_Games&hash=item4aa76ac484

Looks like a little more than "bugger all" (cute colloquialism) to me!

[kickstart]

Just for some intros on the cracked games and the nice scene from this time cracked games are ok.

All of us have original games but the ratio original vs cracked are 1/100 at least.

[Tuxon86]

Piracy hurts the software developer and distributor. The hardware need the software to be useful. So if the developer leaves the platform then the hardware dies.

But, what killed the Amiga was shitty management and failure to perform in the north American market. While the Amiga (and Atari ST) were phenomenon in Europe, by the early 90's they were totally eclipsed in north America by the cheap PC clones.

Commodore also put too much emphasis on the video editing function of the Amiga platform, IMO, while letting the other possibility like games, audio, graphic & desktop editing by the roadside. The lack of accelerated graphics on the later model did more to damage the Amiga as a gaming platform than piracy did, but even then, most of the software developer had moved on to the next great platform.