how many people here actually buyed q1?

The reason there weren't more pirated copies of Q1 is that 80mb was a LOT to download on a 28.8 back in 1996. And no one had CD burners.

Meanwhile, today you can download 3 CDs worth of data overnight if you get a good torrent. And torrent's are capable of resuming a download, which, I might add, is not something that every HTTP or FTP server supported in 1996. 

I don't blame the companies for doing what they can to protect themselves; one exception I'll mention. Deus Ex: Invisible War. If it is installed on a WindowsXP or 2000 system, you have to have Asministrator status to even install the program. That just tells me that it is doing things under the hood it has no business doing. 

I think companies are failing to see that more people will buy the game if there is no such thing as a cdkey/copy protection . . . how many people here actually buyed q1? I think a big secret to its success was that you didn't have to buy it to play online and with friends.

What.

"More people will buy the game without protection", but then "no one bought Q1"? You don't seem to be making a whole lot of sense.

It's clear that many people out there will not buy a game unless they have to. It's human nature and many people are worthless leeching fucktubs.

That being said, it's an interesting idea to get people "hooked" and then apply copy protection, albeit a little iffy, since what's to stop people from just playing with the older version . . .

In any case, Painkiller SP kicks much ass. I'm going through a second time to unlock the other levels and the "real" ending, and to find all the secrets (I very much enjoy the challenge involved--I like that sort of crap).

(How about a Painkiller icon?) 

But I made sure it was a UK copy because it didn't require activation through id unlike the North American version at the time. Quake had only been out for a few weeks.

Best $60Cdn I ever paid. I also bought both mission packs, Shrak, Malice and QZone. Mission packs were very good - some of the others listed weren't so good. 

rather late actually. Quake 2 was already out, and I had never really been into computer games until I my friend showed me this new "Quake" thing. After that I was pretty much hooked. As soon as I had a decent computer, I rushed out and bought the game, plus the two mission packs. After that I tried Malice - reasonably impressed. Then a couple of years later I tracked down a copy of Shrak on eBay - which turned out to be rubbish.

I have since bought extra copies of Quake on CD, for no real reason other than out of pure love for the game. 

Shrak can still be purchased?
I've checked the website and it seems not bad, though it's x years old and there're tons of mod haging on the net. 

You'll probably have to search around on eBay. In my opinion, it's not worth paying much for it. It's much lower quality than any of the official mission packs, and like you say, there is a metric arseload of superior free mappage floating around the net. 

Sorry, guess I trailed off a little. Only one of my friends bought q1, and we were about 10 people sharing that one cd(and burning off it, Sweden being the IT nation it is, alot of people had burners when q1 came out.)

I was making a bad and probably very false point when I said that more people will buy it if it doesn't have cd protection, something the game will however, is become famous, popular and long-lived. 

sigh, bosses are fun and easy to solve. go use yer graymatter dammit! :)

pk, has the best bosses evar! 

pk, has the best bosses evar!

I loved the swamp boss, great battle that one, and very visual too. Great boss.

The Tower boss is also very good, and visual too, the other 2 or 3 bosses weren't as good but still fun. 

i was one of the few who devoted a couple of days to download quake when it came out. :P but i had a 486 back then, so quake didn't play very well. i ended up buying the whole thing a little while later as a big package, with quake, and both mission packs in one because i felt the game company deserved the money. 

I don't remember complaining about the bosses on this thread. But, I will:

First boss was okay. A bit tedious but impressive and fairly straightforward.

Second boss sucked. Looked great, but frustrating and gimmicky. Spending ages figuring out what to do whilst dying. No gameplay fun whatsoever. Eventually I found a walkthrough but even then it was pretty pointless.

I'm getting the feeling that it's not really possible to have a good boss combat, I think intrinsically boss combats can't be fun. They're either pointlessly repetitive, annoyingly trick dependent, or just too hard. I think the way to have boss combats is try to make them a climatic and fitting conclusion to the previous combats with particular regard to story and progression, i.e. focus on them as the conclusion to previous progression rather than just a random big monster. So far, PK's are the latter. 

The fucking thing crashes about a quarter of the way through the first CD with the error message:

Error while decompressing file C:\Program Files\Dreamcatcher\Painkiller\Data\Movies\end_of_chapter_1.bik, err = -5

I tried installing again but got the same message. Oh well, back to the shop I go. 

looks like the end of that error message has been eaten by the func_msgboard gremlins, but you get the idea. 

Perhaps there's a hardware issue or something and a patch to resolve it? 

But I'm checking the tech faqs on the website just in case. 

there was a lot of problems with cd security things or something like that... i'm not sure why some people get it and others don't though. there is a patch that's supposed to fix the installation though. 

I'll have a look at that.

I've tried installing it 4 times now. After the first abort, I did some googling and found that some people have been having the same problems and that it was caused by the presence of certain spyware on their system. One SpyBot purge later, I still get CRC checking errors, and they happen at different points in each attempted install. I've already been down to the shop once and got a replacement copy of the game, thinking it was a dodgy cd, but no luck. I've tried disabling all my startup programs - and I've just done a full virus check. 

Necros, AKAIK, that would only help if I had managed to get the thing installed in the first place. I can't even get the files on the first CD to copy to my hard drive, without the installation aborting. Anyway, I've emailed tech support, so hopefully that might help. 

The levels had little logical progression from one to another so I wouldn't expect the bosses to. That suits me just fine.

I thought the PK bosses were pretty decent with the swamp guy being a low point and the guy with mjolner a high point. 

aww.. that's too bad. i think you would really like the game. it's got lots of horde combat. >:) 

is willing to give up his copy before I play it. I gave'em Far Cry dang it! 

trying to get this to work, but I don't think I can invest any more time in it than that. I emailed tech support and they gave me a swift and lengthy reply - this is clearly a common problem - their solution involves having to download and install numerous spyware removing utilities; I have to fiddle with my CD drive's DMA/PIO, whatever the hell that is; I have to disable/remove various multimedia players that I may have installed; and I have to disable an arseload of other misc. programs that may be running in the background as well.

All this just to get the installer to work - from what I gather from the forums, this is 100% due to Dreamcatcher's anti-piracy software. It is also only the first stage - if I can manage to install it, I'll need to download the latest patch for the game before I can even think about running it.

All in all, I think the approach Dreamcatcher is taking to the anti-piracy issue is nothing short of disgusting. People such as myself are the ones that suffer here; not the pirates. They will find a way to crack the game no matter what; they always do. 

Yeah what a load of bollocks. Just download the er 'evaluation' version and install that - no problems. Truth be told the game is a great big festering pile of shit anyways so you're not missing much. Get a refund if you can. 

settings are easy to check/change, you should always use the highest setting for performance. It's the protocol that is used between the physical HD/CD unit and the controller on the motherboard.

Depending on OS, go to "Device Manager" (normally a tab in "My Computer", "System Settings"), then expand the "IDE ATA ..." line and right-click on either the Primary or Secondary channel (probably the latter).

Primary is usually the main HD on unit 0 and Secondary is often CD/DVD etc. Don't change the setting for your main HD.

Look at the "Advanced settings" tab and verify that "Transfer setting" is set to "DMA if available". After change and reboot, you can see on the line below what protocol it settled for.

Normally, it should never be set to PIO (*very* old and slow IDE protocol). The higher the DMA level, the better (faster).

The main difference between PIO and DMA is that the latter can transfer larger chunks of data at a time and requires much less CPU supervision.