Hacker News Reader

Comment by glacials | Hacker News Reader

I'm one of twelve speedrunners of this game [1] and this is a killing blow to our community. Those of us lucky enough to have the game installed are the only ones who can continue speedrunning this game, and we can never uninstall it or switch computers. No new speedrunners can enter the scene. It was enough work getting it to run over the years without Games for Windows Live, or at a modern resolution, or at a modern framerate, with horrible keyboard controls, and without crashing at boot due to driver issues.

Now, new players can't even get their foot in the door enough to see that there are fixes. Even with a crack, this is the end of speedrunning for us.

[1]: https://www.speedrun.com/tronevolution

View on HN

Why can't you speedrun with the crack? If everyone agrees on a common executable that works it can be verified via SHA256 and still be used for speedruns.

It's hard to get people in the community if you have to crack the game to even do a run.

Just FYI, cracking the game now that the DRM is expired is 100% Fair Use in the USA under the DMCA 1201 exemptions. Thanks EFF!

It's also fair use in at least Sweden if not whole Europe. If you own software, you are allowed to fix it so you can use it.

Do you have any link? I'd like to read more.

https://www.google.com/search?q=DMCA+1201

That doesn't seem like a high bar honestly. There's many games that much harder to get started with, you might need to buy an old console or buy a specific version of a game. Downloading and installing a cracked game should be easy.

just in guide mention it as a community patch :)

If you're going to do that, at least send it to a security company to test for malware... or you could end up in deep trouble if unlucky?

Someone that is dedicated enough to potentially start speedrunning some 10 year old game, shouldn't really be stopped by having to install some extra "patch".

I have to ask, how does it feel investing so much time into something that just evaporated overnight?

Do you think your skills can translate to other games?

FWIW, I'm a big fan of the speedrunning community: Karl Jobst, Calebhart, kosmic, etc. I can't imagine what it would be like if, say, FF7 stopped working due to DRM and Caleb had to switch games. He'd be alright, but most of his audience comes to see FF7.

EDIT: It sounds like people have patched the game to work without SecuROM. Do you think that might coax new players into the scene? One positive way to look at this is that it's free advertising for this particular game.

Isn't there a crack?

What about PSP, PS3, & 360?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com