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

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Who here remembers needing to have the CD in the computer every time you wanted to play a computer game? I remember as a child every time I wanted to play a certain computer game, I had to have the CD in the computer. If the CD for the game wasn't in the computer, you couldn't play the game.

Had an Atari. I remember upgrading the RAM TO 1MB... then I really was away. I used to play "Knights of the Sky" for hours on end.

Embarrassing edit... it wasn't even a CD, it was a floppy disc... oops!

Yep, I remember the CD needing to be in the computer.

I recently tried to get back inside my old Sims and SimCity, but the disc is reading as an error -- must be scratched -- so I can't get back in the games.

Reminds me of a funny story: my first game on Steam was Civilization 5, which I bought physically. I left the disk somewhere when traveling once and didn't play for weeks until I got the disk back, not realizing the disk was just an install code. I definitely remember disks, and I still have some that I use because they're not available digitally, like Star Trek: Birth of the Federation (still a fine 4X game: it might be eighteen years old but it's aged very gracefully).

Unless you mean online games, I thought that was still the case.

Who remembers when if you wanted to play a game you had to type it in from a book or a magazine.

The winner!
I knew someone who had an early Spectrum computer. He programmed a flight simulation. It was basically a line across the screen. When you took off the line went lower, when you turned the line went on a slant. It was fascinating enough at the time.

Not so much, really. Nowadays you can simply install the game onto a hard drive and play it unrestricted without even needing the disk, even for game consoles. Discs have become essentially useless aside from that function.

Chessmaster was like that.

I remember installing no-cd cracks...but I don't remember actually having a physical disc in the drive.

Technology marches on. When I got my Mac a few years ago I thought I'd better get a plug-in external CD drive to go with it. Can't remember when I last used it. Makes a good coaster for my coffee though.

I still remember the days of floppy disks.

And frankly would love to go back to that.

For as much as these things have "advanced", things like freaking Windows just bring up about two billion problems that simply didnt exist back then. At least back then, when I told the machine to do something, it just freaking did it. Nowadays, Windows MIGHT do it, or it might not, or it might just do some stupid thing you didnt even want.

Just.... ugh. Would love the older machines back, yep.

Thanks for clearing that up. I pretty much only play DS and 3DS these days, so I'm only familiar with them now, and Nintendo consoles from before Wii.
Doesn't that take up awfully much memory?

Depends on the game of course, and how much space on the hard drive is already used up.

There were a lot of games that didn't use the CD for copy protection purposes, but did use the Redbook audio for the game's soundtrack...so I would go to play something like Quake, and instead of Nine Inch Nails it would be Black Sabbath

Whoops.

I think I have done that exactly one time. It was probably when we had an Aquarius, and I typed in one of the BASIC programs from the manual...IIRC, I spent all that time on it only to find that I had made a typo somewhere, or the manual did =|


Yes, yes it does =) I usually try to avoid digital downloads, but I bought a digital copy of Xenoblade Chronicles on the WiiU, and didn't have enough space left to install the Breath of the Wild patches. You can optionally install stuff to an external hard drive (and maybe SD cards?), but you have to format the drive to be specifically for the WiiU, so I've never bothered. I just deleted some demos and some terrible free games I had (like that awful Skunk Games thing).

Technically, with Nintendo though (not sure about the Switch), I'm pretty sure you have to buy a digital copy of the game if you want to install it; you can't just install the game from a disc/cart like with Xbone or PS4.

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).