I have Quake III Arena, a paid-for legitimate game that I bought five or six years ago. Maybe longer ago than that.

It was originally installed on my computer at work in Alaska, and I just now finally got around to installing it on my computer here at home.

On my work computer, the game ran without the CD in the CD drive. I have no idea what trickery was involved in making this happen, I think my engineer at the radio station did it.

Does anyone know what I have to do so I don't have to keep putting my CD in the drive to play it?

tanstaafl.

I don't know what your latency is like down there, but you should take a look at http://www.quakelive.com/

Quake III Arena removed the CD check in a patch shortly after release. Make sure to patch it and it should get rid of the check.

id added the check to satisfy the publisher, then ripped it out as soon as they could. I wish more developers would do that.

I had a similar but more dire situation with one of my old games. I plunked down good money for GTA Vice City back in the day. But a couple months ago I tried installing it on my Windows 7 system. It installed fine with no warnings from Windows. But when I tried playing and got past the menus, there was no response from the mouse. After a couple hours of research, finding nothing but a few message boards where people described the issues but nobody helped, I decided to give up and went to Steam.

After $9.99 and a quick install, I had the game working perfectly. Sure, I was pissed that I had to pay again for such an old game, but it just worked.

I've come to the conclusion that I'll probably only buy computer games on Steam from now on.

Tom's reply is correct. Many games, when first released, required the CD in the drive to play. After the initial sales numbers drop off and the copy protection scheme is no longer as important as it used to be, some publishers allow the developers to release update patches which, in addition to fixing bugs, remove the CD copy protection. Id software tended to do this more quickly than others.

The copy protection systems are a nightmare for technical support so its actually in their interest as well to get rid of it as quickly as possible. They all rely on trying to do sneaky things as obscurely as possible to make it harder for people to circumvent it. This usually means that it gets tripped up by the odd computer configurations that exist out in the world.

Nope, I found that but it didn't work for me!

I installed the patch, the game still requires the CD.



tanstaafl.

Edit: Never mind. I installed the patch in the wrong directory (desktop directory with shortcuts to my games instead of the Quake3 directory on a different drive)

Doh!

db