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Australia

Nintendo Wins Lawsuit Over R4 Mod Chip Piracy 146

Posted by Soulskill from the sorry-about-your-luck dept.
schliz writes "The Federal Court has ordered an Australian distributor to pay Nintendo over half a million dollars for selling the R4 mod chip, which allows users to circumvent technology protection measures in Nintendo's DS consoles. The distributor, RSJ IT Solutions, has been ordered to cease selling the chip through its gadgetgear.com.au site and any other sites it controls, as well as paying Nintendo $520,000 in damages."
Games

Ubisoft's Constant Net Connection DRM Confirmed 631

Posted by Soulskill from the enjoy-getting-flamed-by-the-entire-internet dept.
A few weeks ago we discussed news of Ubisoft's DRM plans for future games, which reportedly went so far as to require a constant net connection, terminating your game if you get disconnected for any reason. Well, it's here; upon playing review copies of the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers VII, PCGamer found the DRM just as annoying as you might expect. Quoting: "If you get disconnected while playing, you're booted out of the game. All your progress since the last checkpoint or savegame is lost, and your only options are to quit to Windows or wait until you're reconnected. The game first starts the Ubisoft Game Launcher, which checks for updates. If you try to launch the game when you're not online, you hit an error message right away. So I tried a different test: start the game while online, play a little, then unplug my net cable. This is the same as what happens if your net connection drops momentarily, your router is rebooted, or the game loses its connection to Ubisoft's 'Master servers.' The game stopped, and I was dumped back to a menu screen — all my progress since it last autosaved was lost."

Comment Re:Punched cards - there was a machine for that (Score 1) 731

by Ravenger (#27770957) Attached to: Old-School Coding Techniques You May Not Miss

The first computer program I ever wrote was when I was at school in 1977 in mathematics class. It was a BASIC program to print out a list of numbers, and had to be transcribed onto the equivalent of punched cards, except the 'holes' weren't punched out. Instead you used a soft pencil to colour in the 'holes' to match the binary ascii code of each character in your line of code. There was one card per line of code, each with a max 80 characters that you could encode on them.

These cards were sent off to a university somewhere, and the resulting print-outs would be sent back a week or so later. Unfortunately my program didn't work. If I had got a printout back it'd probably have said 'SYNTAX ERROR'.

As I was a school-kid at the time I didn't really realise exactly what I was doing, but looking back now it's pretty cool to have at least attempted to write a computer program on such an ancient input device. Shows how far we've come since I was a kid.

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