[HN Gopher] A swashbuckling tale of Italian software piracy - 19...
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A swashbuckling tale of Italian software piracy - 1983-1993 (2022)
Author : alberto-m
Score : 92 points
Date : 2025-01-06 16:17 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (genesistemple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (genesistemple.com)
| lormayna wrote:
| I am Italian and I remember very well when, around the 90, I
| frequently go to the computer shop to buy copied games in 3.5
| floppies with handwritten labels. They cost the equivalent of
| 2.5EUR and frequently this was the best way to get a virus.
| napolux wrote:
| we probably went to the same shop. also same price! :D
| Dansvidania wrote:
| I joined a bit later but I remember a very similar atmosphere
| with "modified" playstations and games "alla duchesca" :)
| riffraff wrote:
| I do recall getting a cassette with a ton of games at the
| newspaper kiosk, and realizing only decades later those were all
| pirated titles, and wondering how that had happened.
|
| This article finally made it click!
| weinzierl wrote:
| For me it was decades later that I finally realized that Mario
| and Luigi were not in fact cheap rip-offs of Giana and Maria
| and it was the other way round.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| The Great Giana Sisters also had Chris Huelsbeck do the
| music.
|
| And, arguably, Giana wasn't a _cheap_ rip off. It was clearly
| inspired by it, and a better game on a better platform.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| It wasn't cheap but also it wasn't better either. The
| controls and physics are _very_ stiff in Great Giana
| Sisters. To me it always felt more like a tech demo, though
| that could be said for a lot of games of the era.
| bonzini wrote:
| The Great Giana Sisters was a legitimate game though--while
| the gameplay was obviously almost identical to Super Mario
| Bros, code wise it was technically very advanced as far as
| C64 games went. The way you phrased it seems like it was a
| bootleg version of the NES game.
|
| But Nintendo was just as litigious back then, so the game
| didn't last long.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Literally every newspaper kiosk, convenience store, etc had
| racks of cassettes in half of mainland Europe (esp. Italy,
| Spain, Portugal) during the 80s and 90s. I use to relish trips
| to the mainland to stock up on the latest ZX Spectrum games.
|
| Later on they were a good source for those pirated multi-game
| carts for consoles.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| You say mainland Europe, were you on a smaller island
| somewhere?
| acomjean wrote:
| Interesting that it was quasi legal in Italy.
|
| I remember being in Mexico City in the early 2000s and seeing
| dvds of software being sold. What was remarkable to me was some
| wasn't games but professional applications like autocad and
| maya..
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Hong Kong in 1998 had small stores with professional software
| piracy. "There are no software companies here" was the rumor..
| all tech companies that had regular income and employees sold
| hardware. Any software development professionally was
| associated with a hardware company of some kind at that time
| there.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| I remember being there, long queues of people buying copied
| floppy disks.
|
| We even created "Game Doctor" which is basically a device
| that could jailbreak SFC to play games copies to floppies.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Same in Portugal during this time period, it was almost
| impossible to buy actual legal software for 8 and 16 bit home
| computers.
|
| Most shops would have floppies and tapes, with covers that were
| copied mostly B&W, or a bit more pricy for colour.
|
| With luck you could get some printout copies of the manuals as
| well, or very least the "copy protection codes".
|
| The dream of most kids during the 8 bit days was a doule deck
| tape recorder.
| jortis wrote:
| I too remember those years very well (from '83 onwards, when I
| managed to get a Sinclair ZX Spectrum as a gift). Magazines were
| very common at newsstands, but even in regular specialized
| stores, most of the games were pirated. I still have the
| instruction manual in Italian (completely counterfeit) for the
| game ELITE on the ZX Spectrum. The same happened when I bought a
| Commodore 128 three years later, and again a couple of years
| after that when I got an Amiga 500. You only had to go to the
| shop where you bought the computer to purchase games or other
| software. I still remember Deluxe Paint and a C compiler--if I'm
| not mistaken, it was Lattice C.
|
| And shall we talk about the common practice of pirating DOS or
| Windows? Starting from Windows 95 onwards... Truly a different
| world. The illegality in that field was scandalous for entire
| decades... (and even now, in many professional offices, it's
| still common practice to use cracked copies of Adobe Acrobat...).
| weinzierl wrote:
| I once borrowed a Windows 95 CD from a fellow student. He had
| brought it from China. It looked totally legit, not at all
| home-burned with inkjet printed cover. A true original.
|
| The only thing that gave it away was that in addition to
| Windows it had Doom on it.
| stevekemp wrote:
| I remember complaining to a friend a few years ago that my
| reverse-engineering and binary-patching skills were atrophied
| because there were so few Linux binaries which prompted users
| to enter a registration code to make them fully-functional.
|
| Happily these days I still get to reverse things, and patch
| binaries, for my own amusement.
| napolux wrote:
| Good all times. As usual great quality content from genesistemple
| fm2606 wrote:
| I grew up in midwest small town USA, around 3500 people, in the
| 80s. I attended monthly C64 user group and it was pretty much
| nothing more than copying each others software.
| lubujackson wrote:
| Me too. My dad would go to "the computer club" and bring back
| some diskettes.
|
| Best part was, most of the games were hobbyist efforts so I'd
| get a true floppy (5 1/2") that held maybe 320kb? And each side
| would have like 10 or 15 games each.
|
| There was a later period on PCs in the 386/486 era where you
| would buy a magazine and it'd come with a CD loaded with games
| - back when shareware was a perfect vessel for marketing games
| that were easily stolen - good enough to sate a broke kid but
| also led to many Xmas gift wishlist items. iD had so much
| street cred in my circle.
| vyrotek wrote:
| Hmm. I never really knew where my dad got this mountain of
| Amiga disks. A mix of legit and not. As kids we would always
| find something new to play digging through them.
|
| https://x.com/vyrotek/status/1722050918265274434
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| My neighbor in the early 90s was a 747 pilot on a regular
| route to Hong Kong. We'd give him a list of requests and a
| couple bucks and he'd come back with disks of whatever we
| wanted.
| glonq wrote:
| Ditto for the Atari user group meetings I attended here in
| Vancouver in the mid 80's.
| appstorelottery wrote:
| Yeah, same for an Aussie Amiga group in '88 - wholesale piracy,
| everyone running XCOPY - looking through each other's disk-
| boxes and copying. I remember seeing ads in the local paper for
| software at $2 per disk, send SAE for free calalogue. The
| pirate scene for the Amiga back in those days was huge. We even
| had a local group that traded on an international scale,
| hooking everyone up with the big groups in Europe. Fun times
| for sure!
| leptons wrote:
| Here in Southern California in the 80's and 90's we just called
| them "copy parties".
|
| We'd even hold them at respectable places sometimes like a
| bank's conference room someone somehow managed to get access
| to. Everyone brought a little folding table, and their C64s,
| and later Amigas.
|
| I was also part of some cracking groups, making intros for them
| - FBR, Agile, Intense, TSM, and some others. I was also
| involved in some warez BBSs, making customizations to the BBS
| code. We did all the phone phreaking stuff too.
|
| And as a consequence of being too involved in some of these
| people's lives, I now have both an FBI and Secret Service file
| on me. I had no repercussions, but my friends sure did (for the
| phone related stuff). The stories I could tell...
|
| It really was the golden age of warez.
| xoxxala wrote:
| We had an Apple II club in Southern California in the early 80s
| that did the same thing. Couple dozen of us meeting once a
| month and sharing floppies. Multiple systems with 10 disk
| drives and using Penulticopy to make nine duplicates at a time.
| We all ended up with far more programs (mostly games) than we
| could ever use in our lifetime.
|
| I eventually started a small dial-up BBS to trade warez amongst
| friends and play some multiplayer games, but stopped when the
| number got out and strangers started dialing in. Completely
| freaked me out and for the next few months thought the FBI was
| going to be knocking on my door.
|
| I spent more on blank floppies during that era than legal
| software.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Yeah I was that weird guy that had multiple 1541 floppy drives
| at club meetups... lol
| davidw wrote:
| This is an interesting movie along those lines, although it's
| about pirating music rather than games. The protagonists live in
| Naples.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_by_Erry
| jansan wrote:
| My wife said that in Eastern Europe in the 80s and early 90s it
| was common to go to a "record shop" and give a certain list of
| songs that the owner of the shop, who was just someone with
| access to some records, a record player and a cassette
| recorder, would copy to a cassette for a fee. This was the only
| way to get western music, and there were most certainly no
| copyright laws at all that would have regulated that.
|
| Edit: I asked my wife for details and there was an actual shop
| offering this service, but they got their cassettes from
| another guy who was married to a stewardess. She brought CDs
| back from her trips abroad, and he made a business copying the
| CDs to cassettes and selling them. Eventually he got in trouble
| with an organized crime group who had learned that he was
| making good money and wanted a share of it. This was in the
| early 90s in Sofia/Bulgaria.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Do any communist nations respect copyright to the life-in-
| prison-for-violation degree that we in the US do?
|
| How much was IP enforcement a driver of the west's war on
| socialism and the Cold War?
|
| In the 2000s and earlier China sure as heck didn't care about
| western IP rights.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| North Korea didn't join the 1886 Berne Convention until
| 2003... so it probably was a free for all until then.
|
| I can just imagine some guy in Pyongyang sitting with fully
| legal copies of every copyrighted work up until 2003.
| miki123211 wrote:
| > Do any communist nations respect copyright to the life-
| in-prison-for-violation degree that we in the US do?
|
| No, for many reasons, the primary one is that "victimless"
| crime is a lot more common there, and a lot more necessary
| for survival / decent living conditions.
|
| Things like stealing from your employer, slacking off as
| much as possible, copyright infringement, smuggling
| prohibited goods, selling alcohol / cigarettes without the
| required permits, nepotism, bribery etc were a lot more
| widespread in the communism days.
|
| If you were building a house, it wouldn't be too unusual to
| get your bricks from a friend who worked at a construction
| site, your furniture from a friend who worked at a
| furniture factory, and so on. Most people lived like that,
| and skirting the law in that way wasn't really viewed as
| immoral by anybody.
|
| We had a proverb saying something the lines of "no matter
| if you're standing around or lying down, you're still
| getting your salary." This was how most people approached
| life back then.
|
| Re: copyright infringement specifically, most of the IP
| being copied was from western nations, which we weren't on
| particularly friendly terms with, so there was very little
| reason to do anything about it. You'd be helping the enemy
| economically for no gain for you (as we were incapable of
| producing any IP that the west wanted).
|
| > How much was IP enforcement a driver of the west's war on
| socialism and the Cold War?
|
| IP enforcement, not much at all, national security and
| copying technology for military purposes were much larger
| concerns.
| soperj wrote:
| 100 years ago they sure as heck didn't care about British
| IP rights in the United States.
| TaurenHunter wrote:
| This image shows how it was in Brazil around 2006:
|
| the general manager of Worldwide Anti-Piracy at Microsoft, Keith
| Beeman, looking at the copies of Windows Vista and Office 2007
| sold on Sao Paulo streets for R$10 (something like 5 USD).
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20070119230014im_/http://g1.glob...
| amarcheschi wrote:
| In more recent times, conspir4cy, or cpy, has been an Italian
| group cracking denuvo drm.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_warez_groups
|
| They stopped being active a few years ago
| Dansvidania wrote:
| I am from Naples and I must admit I was quite shocked when in my
| mid teens I learned software would normally be bought in the
| "official" ways; and for what prices :D
|
| It was all shareware and cracked disks until then (probably a bit
| past then to be frank)
| malkia wrote:
| Bulgaria (and the rest of the eastern block) were cloning all
| kinds of computers. My first one was Pravetz 8C, which was really
| Apple ][/e or /c
|
| One of our most prestiguos software/hardware companies employed
| people solely to pirate and translate tech.
|
| https://sandacite.bg/%D0%B1%D1%8A%D0%BB%D0%B3%D0%B0%D1%80%D1...
|
| Has several examples of screenshots from Karateka, Moon Patrol,
| and others translated in bulgarian.
|
| lol.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I don't see how copying numbers is a problem, just because
| someone lined up the numbers in a particular way.
|
| Calling it piracy is completely ridiculous too: pirates were
| killing, pillaging and stealing.
|
| The real problem are the anti piracy law and the governments
| enforcing the will of large corporations.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Stuart Ashen (Ashens) just did a video about the topic of 1980s
| game piracy in Italy, but his video was mostly about the cover
| art. Many of the pirate versions of games stole their cover art
| from a book or movie poster, and his video shows the real game,
| the bootleg game, and shows where the cover art was stolen from.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_PIxYFmA-Q
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Arcade games were not exempt from being copied either. There
| was a whole black market of people working with arcade boards
| bought at various European fairs which would then proceed to copy
| each chip on the board by hand, in order to create a sort of 1:1
| copy, to be sold all over the territory in hundreds of specimens.
|
| And not just arcade games. Full on arcade cabs were copied. Many
| people who played in Europe on arcade machines (I remember those
| at the bowling and tennis club) were actually playing on fully
| "pirated" cab and PCBs.
|
| I have such a vintage, bootleg, cab from the mid eighties since
| about ten years now. It looks like a Taito cab (the one they used
| a lot, with nice curves on the left and right of the screen: one
| of the nicest cab IMO) but it's not a 100% identical copy and
| someone obviously converted it to the JAMMA standard at some
| point.
|
| I've got both vintage PCBs, bootleg PCBs and a Raspberry Pi with
| a Pi2JAMMA adapter.
|
| Some of the games are still very fun to play.
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(page generated 2025-01-09 23:01 UTC)