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From: Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: 'People like to hate EA, I don't know why'
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2025 11:29:40 -0400
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On Tue, 25 Mar 2025 14:01:59 -0400, Mike S. <Mike_S@nowhere.com>
wrote:

>On Tue, 25 Mar 2025 09:16:17 +0000, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:
>
>>Oh I did and it was just finicky to get it to work. To rub salt into the 
>>wound I thought, hang on a sec I've actually paid to buy this thing 
>>although strictly speaking not really as £10 was by then the anchor 
>>price for premium games which you can blame Ultimate for with Sabre Wulf.
>
>The craziest copy protection scheme I had to deal with was having to
>plug in this adapter\dongle thingy that came with one of my games to
>play it. I thought that was weird, but that  has nothing on Lenslock.


The most famous game on computer to use dongle-based copy protection
was Ocean's "Robocop 3" (and even that game dropped the dongle pretty
quickly because it didn't offer significantly more protection, but did
raise the cost of the game!). "10th Frame", "B.A.T" and "Leaderbord"
and "Neutral Zone" were amongst the handful of others that implemented
dongle protection. Apparently some games on consoles also used dongles
to help bypass the licensing checks used by Nintendo etc. to make sure
only "allowed" games ran on "their" hardware.

Players, in general, hated dongles. The disadvantages were numerous.
They suffered from hardware compatibility issues with hardware that
usually worked well enough but wasn't close enough to spec to work
with the dongle. Dongles were easily lost. If you had multiple games
with dongles, you either had to swap them out (and thus risk losing
one) or face possible compatibility issues caused by chaining dongles.
Checking for the presence of the dongle could often be slow. They
added to the price of the game. And unlike off-disk copy-protection,
they added nothing to the experience of the game (I mean, sure
code-wheels were annoying, but at least you got to spin the wheel ;-).
So you didn't see many games that actually used a hardware dongle.

Of course, for a while CD-ROM based disk-protection could have been
seen as a form of dongle; keep the disk in the drive or the game won't
run! ;-)

Dongles were _a lot_ more common on application software, because the
price of the hardware device was more easily absorbed into the very
high price of the application. Also, because these apps were more
expensive, end users were more likely to take care of them (as opposed
to kids and their throw-away games). But when you were talking about a
$5000 program, you better believe that you knew where the dongle was!
Furthermore, because the app was likely to be in continued use for
year after year, it was much less likely to get unplugged and lost, as
opposed to a game which you will probably stop playing (and remove the
dongle) after a few months. 

All this made dongles a lot more common in business software than in
games. The only software I remember specifically that used a dongle
was Quark Xpress, an early desktop-publishing program, but dongles
were endemic. I recall one instance when an office had a bunch of
dongles (one plugged into the next plugged into the next) that was
easily a foot in length (and the dongles had to be plugged into one
another in a VERY specific order otherwise they wouldn't work).
Dongles are still used to this day; fortunately, most are USB these
days rather than parallel or serial-port based so at least the pain of
chaining is gone ;-)