This was cutting edge tech... I remember the excitement of replacing floppy discs with CDRs...
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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People in the thread are talking about limewire, but I think they are missing the bigger reference here.
Downloading games, burning them onto CD-Rs and then using a Sharpie to make the inner tracks of the disc unreadable as they contained the copy protection.
My only confusion is that I swear it was Playstation and not PC that worked like this.
That's something I'm too brazilian to understand. It was harder to get an unmodded playstation than a modded one that could run any burned CD
For Playstation games you had to get one of the nicer-quality CD-Rs and burn it at a slower speed than usual. Also I remember I got a replacement disk drive cover for my PS2 that allowed you to pull it open with a hook. I'd boot up the console with a legit disc, then use the hook to open the drive without the console knowing and swap in a pirated disc.
That sounds extremely imprecise, was that really a thing? I grew up with an NES, so I'm pretty sure I'm old enough to have heard of this (and my friend had a PlayStation). Pirated games already had any copy protection stripped anyway.
That's why I assumed the sharpie was just for writing what's on the disc. I did that plenty.
Calling it "tracks" probably gave the wrong impression. It was a ring around the hub that looked a bit different.
Ah, so you colored between lines? That makes sense. I guess it would make sense for them to have a fixed unusable region to separate game content from copy protection.