Copy Protection: Difference between revisions
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[[File:copyprotection-stratego 3297.png|link=Stratego|frame|[[Feelies|Code wheel]]? F***, I downloaded the game!]]
Even from the early days, the ease of making a perfect copy of software was a concern for gamemakers. Nintendo's experience with the Disk System add-on for the [[Nintendo Entertainment System|Family Computer]] went so badly due to unlicensed copying (called "[[Pirate|Piracy]]") that the company shied away from discs even long after all the other consoles had abandoned cartridges. They did flirt with optical media starting with the GameCube all the way to the Wii U, but reverted to solid-state cartridges not necessarily out of piracy concerns, but due to optical media being too clunky and fragile for a portable console such as the Switch.
So from a fairly early time,
One early method, called "key disc" protection, required that the game access its original disc during loading—metadata not normally preserved when a disk was duplicated was required to play the game. This was prone to failure, made games unplayable on newer machines (as this out-of-band data could not always be found by new hardware), and prevented the player from using a (perfectly legal) personal "backup" copy. Given that floppy disks had a typically short operational lifespan, this also had bad effects for long-term survival. Even a few CD-ROM based games used this method, intentionally introducing errors to the disk, then refusing to run if the error-correction mechanism did less work than expected.
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