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[JoeBlack]

Hello,

I wanted to collect some opinions on tomorrow's abandonware.

Based on the approx. 10 year rule, today we have games from 1997, which were mostly Windows compliant for almost two years at the time, and CD compliant for an even longer period.

As the games were becoming more and more sophisticated and complex, so were the mechanisms to avoid unwanted duplication.
Having started with code wheels and manual-questions ("what is the 5th word on page 13"), there arised an industry which is earning money from keeping pirates away from the valuable products.

And these mechanisms seem to go crazy in the last few years: Checks if burning software is installed (as if anybody would abandon the general possibility to use a burner built into the PC just because of a software doesn't want it), protection against CD emulation, prevention to run in virtual environments, enforced online activation and "damaging" the dumping process of optical media in on driver-level to name a few of the nastiest.

Where is that going? I already have problems to find patches for games I purchased 10 years ago because the developers keep them deeply hidden on their web site or abandoned them completely. What if the online server I need for activation gets shut down because the company doesn't exist any more in the future.

Although 10 years is an unthinkable long time period in terms of product development and lifecycle and no company is probably ever thinking of supporting a product more than 3 years, but then we have MAME and the classic console emulators which let you play games that are up to 30 years old and more to demonstrate that there seems to be a high interest in the gaming community to STILL play these games, and this number is raising with the number of people having a PC. Therefore I consider 10 years to be a short time in the total life of a game (as we can see on this site).

So I'm wondering whether we will lose the ability of keeping today's gaming treasures in future or if they protection industry garbles the contents so much that this will not be possible for a longer time???

Any comments are welcome!