Bungie specifically allowed this to happen with the old Myth franchise. They open-sourced their bungie net code when they shut it down. Since then, several fan sites have kept the servers alive. The game was published in 1997.
I believe it was actually the work of a member of the Halo PC community; one non-affiliated programmer aliased as "btcc22" who kept it alive.
Soon after the GameSpy services shut down, he wrote an emulator to replace the official master server. Bungie then (shockingly) released v1.10 to point the game to the new server, and stepped in and ate the cost of the AWS services used to power the lobby.
Source: I gave my life to that game for a very, very long time and still check in on the community every now and then.
Fun fact: Eric Koger, the CEO of ModCloth.com, also spent quite a bit of time reloading his pistol and rifle.
Bungie released the original binaries and assets for all three games (http://trilogyrelease.bungie.org/). You can play these on vintage hardware, Aleph One just lets you play on modern hardware.
While I say "original", these are different from the retail versions of the original games, which required serial numbers. Bungie's Jason Jones removed the serial number check himself, without the original source.
Sadly, I don’t think the game companies are going to accept this – they are probably afraid that legitimizing this will make development of replacement server code start early (in anticipation of the shutdown of the official servers) and that the existence of working code, even though it will somehow be illegal to run, will still be run by many people, loosening the company’s iron grip of the players through the official servers.
I don't think that would loosen the iron grip of game companies - as you mentioned it would be "illegal to run" such servers then, just as much as it is now. And they would "still be run by many people" regardless.
No, my point is that the eventual legality of such services will make them be developed earlier than they would be developed had they been illegal indefinitely.
Correct me if I am wrong but the statement "game’s audiovisual content is primarily stored on the developer’s server and not in the client" is not true for any mmo.
3D models and audio are saved to the clients disk. It's the state of the persistent world that is stored on the server.
This only allows for a streaming install. It's without question definitely primarily stored on the individual users' harddrives. Once you've downloaded the textures/models/whatever, you will not be requesting them from the server ever again.
I'm kinda disappointed that they're carving out a huge exception for MMO-style games. If anything, I think that (if only due to the social structures that evolve within them) they're the most valuable but fragile types of online games.
I believe EA gave permission for xwis.net to do this for Red Alert 2. You can sign up with a legitimate key and it works as normal as the protocol was reverse engineered and DNS taken over :)
This was probably straightforward for an old game like this but I can't imagine that reverse engineering the infrastructure required for modern games is feasible. I doubt games companies will have the cash or resources spare to consider this from the beginning nor years after.
> The Register further found that even if proponents had satisfied their burden of
establishing noninfringing uses, they nonetheless failed to demonstrate that video game console
access controls have or are likely to have a substantial adverse impact on such uses. Proponents
identified two broad categories of activities that were allegedly threatened by the prohibition on
circumvention, scientific research and homebrew software development.
So it looks like the EFF are going at it from the abandonment angle this time having failed with the science and homebrew arguments. I'd say they have a better chance of making their case this time.
I didn't read the reasoning, but in my opinion the requirement for giving "abandonware" special treatment has been reduced by the advent of sites like GOG.com which preserve old games. However, there are probably still games that are almost impossible to purchase in playable form, so in principle there should be an allowance for these cases.
Am I the only one still concerned that this is all still in the power of the Library of Congress? It's certainly nice when they're promoting openness and consumer rights, but I'm not sure I like the idea of leaving these choices up to unelected bureaucrats.
I am not a hundred percent behind this in the realm of where the game had no means to be played without the server active. This mostly concerns MMOs. If a stand alone game is hobbled by lack of authentication servers or cannot perform mulitplayer without them I see little issue with the idea of a work around.
However the sub model that most MMOs work under feels more like a lease than ownership to me
FWIW, there is a long history of illegal private servers that offer Vanilla and specific xpac servers for WoW. They are especially popular with people that are into player versus player because people tend to have certain xpacs that they believe were more fun for a variety of specific reasons, mostly related to balance between different character classes.
Every expansion has a "best class", that's for sure. Even if you try to balance everything, that's impossible to achieve; every class has dozens of spells, talents, buffs... and then, some of those spells, talents and buffs can interact with other classes (especially when in party or raid) improving or nerfing them.
In that expansion I'm sure you're talking about, paladins are somewhat better, and shamans are worse. That's normal, and it's not a problem when you play in live servers, since they are making modifications to spells and everything constantly. But when you're stuck in some version, then, you're stuck with how classes work in that version forever. That makes the population lean towards one class.
As worded, I think it would. Every bit of the map geometry and audiovisual content in WoW is client-side.
Server only handles chat (via hybrid-ircd, I think?), and via the main daemon (which seems like it might have been Lua-based at one point, or at least link into it like the client does), state coordination including item looting, and creep behaviour. Creep/boss behaviour and looting have been studied closely enough by tactically-minded players to be effectively black-box reverse-engineered, and fully reimplementable to a high degree of fidelity and precision.
(I'm not going to do it, I quit a while ago, but I did make a pretty popular addon, and did look into things a bit.)
