| I have recently bought a new PC, without a DVD drive, naturally. And tried to re-install my copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. This copy is a "pre order" DVD set I got off of eBay simply because it was a good price, but it's bound to my "Microsoft Account", the same account used in my Windows 11 install. I spent a good part of an hour trying to get this to install. The Microsoft store (also slow as **) didn't let me do it; it doesn't know of this edition nor my license. I eventually discovered that there is a web page somewhere deep on Microsoft.com, which has a download button, which (after three time-outs) opens a secret link into Microsoft Store which ONLY THEN lets me reinstall the product from the Microsoft Store. So I must admit I read that with great joy. Yeah Bill ... Karma! Somewhat unrelated: The icing on the cake, naturally, is that even a full digital install of the DVD edition of MS Flight Sim "requires" the DVD #1 to be in the drive. But since people don't HAVE physical DVD drives in 2020 and upwards, I use an ISO image. You can in fact make an ISO image with just a few tiny files from DVD #1 without the huge data files, that's sufficient. You'd think "oh yeah, copy protection" but there is NOTHING about this DVD image that is akin to any copy protection. It just wants these files as part of a drive (or mounted image), which I'm sure they could even detect the difference, as I'm even mounting it with built-in Windows Explorer functionality these days, without special software). I literally don't know why they would force me to present a (virtual) DVD if there is no other checks whatsoever. This makes no sense but to hurt customers. Somewhat more unrelated: Microsoft still owes me 20 bucks. I once bought a PC with a Windows XP to Vista upgrade coupon. The web site let me select Vista 64 bit, so I gave that a try. Alas, the XP shipped with the PC was 32 bit, so they simply never carried out the order. I called their customer support, where I was nearly chastised in very broken, hard to understand language for selecting the 64 bit version from the drop-down menu. They never carried out the order, and didn't refund my twenty bucks for S&H. Thank God for alternative software distribution methods back then that rhyme with "Pi rate day". Totally unrelated (really going of on a tangent of story telling now): Another company that still owes me roughly 20 bucks is Dell. I once ordered a server from them, and discovered that they had a catalog error. Adding the biggest, meanest CPU would not add money to the bill, but subtract several thousand dollars from the total. So using that trick, for some giggles, I configured a server to be around 20 bucks total and ordered it. I pre-paid the total amount. I didn't expect to get the server, of course, but I expected them to contact me and refund my money. Never heard from them. |
This was very common back in the day. It’s a form of DRM: it prevents you from playing the game on two computers at once.
It used to be common to make your life easier (even if you weren’t sharing the disc) by downloading an unofficial ‘no-cd’ patch, which was a patched game executable that omitted the ‘disc present’ check.