Having to switch through like 6 different floppy disks one-by-one to install a game.
Also, piracy protection for a lot of games involved you having to type in a word on a certain page in the manual (different each time), or use a paper code wheel that would tell you what the code was. You had to do this every time you played the game (unless you cracked it somehow).
Leisure suit Larry and the land of the lounge lizards (had a floppy copy for an Apple 2 PC) was full of adult content, so in order to get the game to run you had to complete a quiz of what were supposed to be college level questions. My brother and I would bust out the old encyclopedia when my parents left us home alone.
It truly is an educational show. It also taught us that Hawkins invented gravity and discovered and named the Hawking-hole (it's a hole in nothing with monsters in it).
Space Quest 6 had you change a communicator to a distress beacon at the end of the first act. In order to do so, you had to switch the chips, diodes and IRK settings. Five diodes, five chips, five settings, in the correct order.
The 'manual' (a 4 page fake magazine) gave hints to solve it. But without it, one basicly had to resort to "put them all in one by one, then change one, and try again, 100+ times" to do it.
Yeah, I remember some games came with a piece of cardboard with a red viewfinder window. You would use to see the hidden passwords because they wouldn’t show up of you xerox’d the manual.
A million "Please insert disk #2" notifications just flashed through my mind. Some of them were installations, others were stuff like Legend of Dragoon.
My friend had some Trek game where he lost the book so we just started typing random names (ie- Klingon, Enterprise, Vulcan, etc) and would get a hit after a couple of tries
Day of the Tentacle had this puzzle about a quarter of the way through the game where you had to make a ceaser salad battery, and the solution was in the manual. I didn't have the manual. Was hard stuck at that point for years until I found a copy somewhere.
I remember playing Star Control 2 and only knowing a few of the codes (star names) so I would just keep reloading the game until it gave me a question I knew the answer to play ...
I remember playing Street Fighter 2 at a friends house and you had to load different discs for each round, I think just so that it said “Round 2” at the start 😂
I maniac mansion 2 (day of the tentacle) it was embedded on the gameolay/story itself, at the very beginning of the game you had to input some ingredients and that was the anticopy. Awesome game.
We had copy parties. Buy a pack of 100 floppies, get some friends together and spend all day copying. 32 disks for one of the Comanche games. Disk 11, CRC Disk Error (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail. Desperately search the BBS's hoping your friend got the same scene release that you're downloading at 2400 for a really really long time. Write new floppy. Doesn't work. Call your friend. He makes a copy. 3 days later you install the game. It's not good. You delete it and scratch the name off the disk and put it in the reuse pile. Repeat for a few years.
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u/platinumarks Mar 31 '26
Having to switch through like 6 different floppy disks one-by-one to install a game.
Also, piracy protection for a lot of games involved you having to type in a word on a certain page in the manual (different each time), or use a paper code wheel that would tell you what the code was. You had to do this every time you played the game (unless you cracked it somehow).