ORIGINAL: Son_of_Montfort
....Seriously, I remember the "golden age" of copy protection. The worst one was Starflight, where you had this disc and you needed to align it to certain star coordinates then give a crazy code to the game before it would let you leave stardock... every time you played the game. If you lost the disc (which we did, nearly twice), you could no longer play the game. Or Starflight 2, where you had to pull out the star map, align a square cardbord "window" on the map according to game given specs, and count the number of a certain color of star in the window. You could lose/destroy both the map and the square... boy was that a nightmare.
And I'll not even got into stories of word counting in manuals... and all the manuals I lost or packed away, blocking access to my game. Might and Magic: Clouds/Darkside of Xeen, Ultima 6 - games that - at least once I sat down and couldn't play because the manual was tucked away on some shelf somewhere and I couldn't find it.
Oh... but today's DRM are EVIL... [:'(] Heck... I had to create an entirely new DOS memory management system just so I could BOOT UP Ultima 7 and Serpent's Isle (and several other Origin and EA games).
The worst copy protection I encountered in the distant past was not the code wheels from the Gold Box games or even the black on chocolate copy protection sheet the original SimCity had. In my opinion, back then the game with the worst copy protection scheme was Chamber of the Sci-Mutant Priestess. The way it worked was that during installation, the game would write a file to the hard drive and then mark that sector as "Bad." If you uninstalled the game, the file was removed. But if you didn't follow that procedure, the game would not work on future installations. I found out the hard way when I formatted my hard drive. [:(]
I won't even mention my experience with StarForce. It was much worse.
