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Re: Question(s) for regular users of this forum |
Sat, 06 December 2008 03:36 |
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craebild | | Lieutenant | Messages: 568
Registered: December 2003 Location: Copenhagen, Denmark | |
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No apology needed, though "The Bar" would be the appropriate place for that question.
To answer your question, Ron is not one of the creators of the game, but as far as I know he has their permission to hand out serial numbers, as Stars! is not being sold by any company any longer.
While Ron does ask for a donation, the request says up to US$ 6,-, so a smaller donation should also get you a serial number, if you cannot afford to pay US$ 6,-.
Med venlig hilsen / Best regards / Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Christian Ræbild / Christian Raebild
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Re: Question(s) for regular users of this forum |
Sat, 06 December 2008 06:30 |
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Eagle of Fire wrote on Sat, 06 December 2008 04:25 | So, if I understand well... The real reason of the donation is simply to prevent people who are not serious enough to get hold of free serial numbers and then use it in a bad way, for cheating or any other kind of reason.
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No, the only reason for the donation is to help defray the cost of maintaining the site.
The site is run by Ron Miller totally gratis & he's done this for quite some years. IMO Ron is the reason why this community survives.
I'm also not sure that Stars can be considered abandonware since the copyright ownership is unclear (others probably know more about that).
Quote: | Thus, I am wondering: would a solution be to ask for a single serial number and ask that this particular number would be banned from AutoHost from the very start to prevent cheating? I assume then that anybody downloading the game and using that serial could fully play the game in single player and possibly also host hotseat games. If anybody then discovered that they were serious enough to go thru with the donation they could then go thru the whole process and get a new serial number to play multiplayer games...
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Cheating is not really much of a problem in Stars games. Players that would even consider doing it are rare & even then they are usually discovered & penalised heavy.
Hotseat games do work with a single serial number.
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Re: Question(s) for regular users of this forum |
Tue, 09 December 2008 19:14 |
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Eagle of Fire | | Lt. Commander | Messages: 809
Registered: December 2008 Location: GMT -5 | |
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I don't think that you understand the concept of Abandonware, m.a@star. It has nothing to do with copyright or ownership of games.
All what matter before we claim a game Abandonware is
1) Time. No new game can be abandonware for obvious reasons. The minimal delay is usualy 8 or 10 years after the game ship.
2) The game must not be currently supported by it's maker or the current owner. This is often translated as when the maker or the owner of the game stop making money from the game. Distributing the game for free then don't hurt them at that moment.
3) There must be no way to legally purchase the game anywhere anymore.
STARS! fall under those rules very easily. It was flagged ABW a long time ago BTW... It is simply one of those slippery titles which are very hard to pin down with a review and which is very hard to distribute due to it's protection scheme. This have way more to do about why it wasn't released on Abandonia already than anything else.
Quote: | Google's your friend, then. There's at least a couple dozen serials that still work for single-player games out there.
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That would be a great solution! But why exactly would there be serials on the net, and why would it not bother players here?
[Updated on: Tue, 09 December 2008 19:16]
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Re: Question(s) for regular users of this forum |
Tue, 09 December 2008 19:25 |
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My personally feelings about copyright aside, those 3 aren't quite accurate...from the Abandonia FAQ:
Why can't I download game X? "...this game is either still sold or actively protected by copyright holder..."
One could argue that since Jeff(Stars!' creator) personally gave Ron(who runs this site) permission to distribute new serials, that Stars! is still protected by the copyright holder.
Eagle of Fire wrote on Wed, 10 December 2008 13:14 | That would be a great solution! But why exactly would there be serials on the net, and why would it not bother players here?
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Because the serials available on the net only work with versions i and below. The lastest version is jRC4(used here)
[Updated on: Tue, 09 December 2008 19:27] Report message to a moderator
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Re: Question(s) for regular users of this forum |
Tue, 09 December 2008 21:46 |
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Eagle of Fire | | Lt. Commander | Messages: 809
Registered: December 2008 Location: GMT -5 | |
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Quote: | from the Abandonia FAQ:
Why can't I download game X? "...this game is either still sold or actively protected by copyright holder..."
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That quote from the Abandonia FAQ simply mean, once translated into "normal" talk: Games with the NO GO! button are not available for download either because they are protected by ESA (an organization which only goal is to enforce copyright laws of companies which ask them to police their rights. Which mean that if we didn't we'd receive stop and desist letters and ultimately have to close the site down) or the maker or the owner actually communicated with Abandonia directly and requested that game X was removed as download.
Most game producers actualy like to have their old games available on Abandonia. It's a great publicity for them, they don't have to pay for the bandwith, and most makers think something similar to this: "What? Game X is still availble and hundred of players still play it today? That's so awesome!"
Abandonware itself is, as you could say, tolerated by the companies themselves and thus in a grey area of the law. As far as the owner of the site don't make money by distributing the game then we are not really stealing anything (it is not warez), and as long as we do comply to requests to remove availability of games when asked they don't mind either. A good example would be when we stoped distributing Civilization around the time CIV III got out.
To return to the NO GO! button, the reason why we have those is that Abandonia wish to preserve the memory of the games themselves. That, and we keep the review material up in respect of the reviewers who did the work, and it's then way easier to simply change the button again if the game status simply change back to available. It would make no sense to simply "get rid" of the reviews then.
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One could argue that since Jeff(Stars!' creator) personally gave Ron(who runs this site) permission to distribute new serials, that Stars! is still protected by the copyright holder.
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Copyright doesn't work that way. Only Jeff could actualy enforce any copyright action. That, and one could also argue that the game is already freely available for anybody who is willing to do a search on the web (as previously stated on this thread) and that since Ron ask for a small fee for the access to his autohosting site rather than the game itself then it has nothing to do with copyright in the first place. The serial is simply an obsolete hardcoded copy protection problem at this point... From which we can get back to Abandonware.
Anyhow, I'd love to know Ron POV on all this. And as stated previously... If Jess actualy don't want us to distritute this game, he simply need to say it and we won't. It's just as simple as that.
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Re: Question(s) for regular users of this forum |
Wed, 10 December 2008 21:28 |
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Effluviant Walrus | | Senior Chief Petty Officer | Messages: 91
Registered: May 2008 Location: New York, US | |
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Are the Jeffs even paying attention to Stars! anymore? Is the publisher?
I don't pretend to know all the legal technicalities of copyright, but if no one has any reason to enforce it, it really doesn't matter, does it? Why would the publisher (if it even exists anymore) waste their lawyers' time on a nonprofitable (as in, Abandonia wouldn't be making money off of it) copyright infringement for a product not being sold anymore?
And I doubt whoever owns the rights even remembers that they own them.
On an unrelated note, Eagle, since you are a reviewer, you might want to ask some players in existing games to share their turns with you so you can see what a game is like without having to wait weeks/months for one to start and get through the first 20 years...
I'd be happy to show you what's going on in Octahedron or In the Beginning, though the latter is ending soon.
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Re: Question(s) for regular users of this forum |
Tue, 16 December 2008 00:29 |
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MRing | | Crewman 3rd Class | Messages: 5
Registered: December 2007 Location: Orlando | |
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If you search for it, links to it can be found in different places but in the discussion on usenet he said it was pretty unlikely. I think he said it'd be easier to rewrite from scratch. It'd be worth it to go look it up if you can; he also talked about some ideas he would include in a new Stars! game if ever he actually made one.
I've talked to a buddy, together the two of us combined were willing to put together a $1000 bounty together for an open-source full-featured future-proof (platform independent, no strange programming language that only 5 people on Earth know) clone.. but a) we should be thinking about savings and b) $1000 probably wouldn't be enough anyway. I know relatively little about programming, but unless it was done largely due to charitable feelings about the game, the real cost could be a lot more than $1000 I figure.
Every once in a while a few people work on clones; Etoiles gets worked on at random, Ed Kolis might continue on Cosmic Crises if we're lucky, etc. And, maybe one of the Jeff's is secretly at work on the weekends. Who knows. Might get lucky one day.
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