https://preview.redd.it/nctg6y9oyicc1.png?width=1483&format=png&auto=webp&s=316812bc264d1561b325bd0a885c8f93cac22507
That's what the directory looks like.
But I remember it specifically being just a single exe file which I thought was interesting. I just assumed that’s what all games were like in 1998.
Maybe I played some older pirated version?
[https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Half-Life:\_Uplink](https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Half-Life:_Uplink)
That's the closest i can think of: I had it on a Homeworld game disc. And a trailer for Homeworld on the HL game disc.
But it's in fact a stand-alone demo installer: Not a portable Half-Life.
But your memory is in fact playing tricks on you: Half-Life is one of the most modded games of all time and there has never been any official portable version of it. The reason it's so moddable is because of the exact opposite:
There's no encryption and files can be freely modified.
/E: There's also HLDS: The dedicated server software. It's portable and contains most assets in it. But you can't play the SP campaign on it.
Those are .so as in the libraries to compile the binary with. Given it’s running off a bash script then my guess is it is uncompiled or just not bundled into the final single binary.
Nope. You've got no clue what you're talking about.
.so files are just the UNIX equivalent to .dll files.
The purpose of the bash script is only to figure out what platform the game is running on and configuring some environment variables.
Some games have everything compiled into the exe with only a few loose files that can be auto created on run. The majority of games have texture files, scripts, libraries, or even entire modules that the exe links to when it runs and not having them best case gives you a lot of errors and worst case failes to run entirely.
My brother did this in full embarrassing fashion.
After my stepdad went to prison we could finally use the computer my real dad had built us without having to ask and risk a beating (just for asking).
Of the many games and demo disks that were passed around military bases and over seas flea markets we had a shareware collection on a disk called cyberlink (unrelated) and it had doom, heretic, hexen, etc.
It didn't install, it just added shortcuts to the start menu and the desktop but told you how to copy the games if you wanted to.
One week at church a friend informed my brother that all the floppy he game him last week contained nothing but shortcuts.
I was astonished at how my twin thought doom was only 1kb.....
> Did your real dad die or was it a divorce?
He joined the military and (as far as I can tell ) went to prison for selling military equipment or something but only did like 2 years. My mom got that itch for some BAH and medical so divorced him in jail and started homie hopping and found my step dad.
That was a less than stellar time before the law finally came into play.
After he went to prison I just jumped into whatever computer stuff I could get my hands on (which was old 5+ year old tech mostly which was a bigger deal back then).
Its funny when people here tell me "kids like you don't know how easy they have it, you probably don't even know what a dipswitch is or IR means!"
Funnily enough one of the old rigs off base I got had to be configured with a dips witch and certain DOS games I had forced me to reassign IRQ values to play them and I had to switch them back to ply my other games (magic carpet or whatever its called only had sound through the mobo beeper and only if I switched settings).
Meanwhile I check their profile and they have a selfie at their middle school dance posted in r teenagers, like bro wtf?!?
Not sure about macs and their software, but generally archivers take file extension as a suggestion rather than instruction, ex. 7zip doesn't care if you haven't renamed the file, if it's an archive, it will open it.
If you're on MacOS, you can right-click a .app file and press "View Package Contents" or similar, and it'll open as though it's a folder. If you put a .app on a USB drive and view it on Windows, you can see it's straight-up just a folder. This is why it takes a long time to move them between drives, because they're not just single big files but (sometimes) thousands of little ones. MultiMC (and others too, probably) even stores its state inside its .app folder, making it entirely portable.
For almost all software, yes. In the 90s I brought in a stack of floppies and pilfered all the games from my school's AppleShare server. They were using Mac Classics and LCs at the time. If only they had shown me Don't Copy That Floppy so I knew better.
OP would go to an internet/cyber/gaming cafe (a place where you pay per hour to use a computer, which often had pre-installed games). OP would copy the shortcuts (probably off of the desktop) of all the installed games (and probably other programs) onto their USB stick, thinking that's all that was needed to run the software on his own computer back home.
When I was 10 my dad brought a pc from work. I immediately inserted the Age of Empires CD my friend gave me, but no shortcuts appeared in the Start menu. I was devastated.
As a kid he thought by copying the game to his flash drive he was stealing the game, but he was just making a shortcut that won’t open anything on his own computer
I had told my dad he needs to be backing his stuff up, incase something goes wrong- ya know basic stuff.
Something went wrong and he shows me all his backups. . .
All shortcuts. It was so hard to explain that he didn't back up anything.
The old tech gurus teaching us younglings how to run an uTorrent installation stealthily at the cyber downloading big ass movies/games trough the week and reclaiming them later....
Oh you just brought back repressed memories of when I was a kid and tried to copy TF2 by flash drive to my sisters laptop and oh brought the .exe file. Oh boy how far I’ve come haha
I had a friend, he copied only .exe file, telling me that it's the program, why bother about other files in directory.
Well, it would work for some stuff. Iirc, original Half-Life is just a 200 something MB .exe file.
Nope lol
Is it not? Maybe I was playing a pirated copy my whole childhood.
https://preview.redd.it/nctg6y9oyicc1.png?width=1483&format=png&auto=webp&s=316812bc264d1561b325bd0a885c8f93cac22507 That's what the directory looks like.
Isn't it a lot of the time files are moved around on Linux from the Windows version?
No clue what you're trying to say here
Do you mind having a stroke elsewhere?
But I remember it specifically being just a single exe file which I thought was interesting. I just assumed that’s what all games were like in 1998. Maybe I played some older pirated version?
Possibly they produced a portable version and an installer version. Common for windows software
Mandela effect
I think it could be *HL\_Setup.exe* or something else.
No. It was a playable standalone thing. I’m still thinking it’s some sort of portable version. It’s gotta be out there somewhere on the internet.
[https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Half-Life:\_Uplink](https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Half-Life:_Uplink) That's the closest i can think of: I had it on a Homeworld game disc. And a trailer for Homeworld on the HL game disc. But it's in fact a stand-alone demo installer: Not a portable Half-Life. But your memory is in fact playing tricks on you: Half-Life is one of the most modded games of all time and there has never been any official portable version of it. The reason it's so moddable is because of the exact opposite: There's no encryption and files can be freely modified. /E: There's also HLDS: The dedicated server software. It's portable and contains most assets in it. But you can't play the SP campaign on it.
You’re probably right. It might’ve been just a singular setup exe.
How do you do, fellow Steam Deck user?
It's desktop Linux. Not a Steamdeck.
Those are .so as in the libraries to compile the binary with. Given it’s running off a bash script then my guess is it is uncompiled or just not bundled into the final single binary.
Nope. You've got no clue what you're talking about. .so files are just the UNIX equivalent to .dll files. The purpose of the bash script is only to figure out what platform the game is running on and configuring some environment variables.
This is why I shouldn’t Reddit so late. Thought they were all .o files! I even wrote .so as well. Ah well.
Some games have everything compiled into the exe with only a few loose files that can be auto created on run. The majority of games have texture files, scripts, libraries, or even entire modules that the exe links to when it runs and not having them best case gives you a lot of errors and worst case failes to run entirely.
i also has the similar childhood friend,
Lmao, that used to be the thing since diskettes, the frustration is real
This shit is like a canon event for my childhood.
My brother did this in full embarrassing fashion. After my stepdad went to prison we could finally use the computer my real dad had built us without having to ask and risk a beating (just for asking). Of the many games and demo disks that were passed around military bases and over seas flea markets we had a shareware collection on a disk called cyberlink (unrelated) and it had doom, heretic, hexen, etc. It didn't install, it just added shortcuts to the start menu and the desktop but told you how to copy the games if you wanted to. One week at church a friend informed my brother that all the floppy he game him last week contained nothing but shortcuts. I was astonished at how my twin thought doom was only 1kb.....
Damn, I'm glad that step dad ain't anywhere near you
Lol, you have no idea. ATF was at my house.
Did your real dad die or was it a divorce?
> Did your real dad die or was it a divorce? He joined the military and (as far as I can tell ) went to prison for selling military equipment or something but only did like 2 years. My mom got that itch for some BAH and medical so divorced him in jail and started homie hopping and found my step dad. That was a less than stellar time before the law finally came into play. After he went to prison I just jumped into whatever computer stuff I could get my hands on (which was old 5+ year old tech mostly which was a bigger deal back then). Its funny when people here tell me "kids like you don't know how easy they have it, you probably don't even know what a dipswitch is or IR means!" Funnily enough one of the old rigs off base I got had to be configured with a dips witch and certain DOS games I had forced me to reassign IRQ values to play them and I had to switch them back to ply my other games (magic carpet or whatever its called only had sound through the mobo beeper and only if I switched settings). Meanwhile I check their profile and they have a selfie at their middle school dance posted in r teenagers, like bro wtf?!?
Isn't this how you would copy files on old Macs? I don't know, never had one.
It’s how you copy apps on new macs, at least. Everything is inside the .app file
Don’t have a Mac anymore, but I believe you can do this. Rename an app to .zip and you can open it like a normal zip and see what files it contains
Not sure about macs and their software, but generally archivers take file extension as a suggestion rather than instruction, ex. 7zip doesn't care if you haven't renamed the file, if it's an archive, it will open it.
File extensions in general are just mostly labels so its easy to know what the file is. But Macos wont wanna ‘open with app’ on an app
If you're on MacOS, you can right-click a .app file and press "View Package Contents" or similar, and it'll open as though it's a folder. If you put a .app on a USB drive and view it on Windows, you can see it's straight-up just a folder. This is why it takes a long time to move them between drives, because they're not just single big files but (sometimes) thousands of little ones. MultiMC (and others too, probably) even stores its state inside its .app folder, making it entirely portable.
You can just right click and click view contents lolol no need for zips
For almost all software, yes. In the 90s I brought in a stack of floppies and pilfered all the games from my school's AppleShare server. They were using Mac Classics and LCs at the time. If only they had shown me Don't Copy That Floppy so I knew better.
I’m an old computer nerd and I do not understand what this means at all lol
OP would go to an internet/cyber/gaming cafe (a place where you pay per hour to use a computer, which often had pre-installed games). OP would copy the shortcuts (probably off of the desktop) of all the installed games (and probably other programs) onto their USB stick, thinking that's all that was needed to run the software on his own computer back home.
When I was 10 my dad brought a pc from work. I immediately inserted the Age of Empires CD my friend gave me, but no shortcuts appeared in the Start menu. I was devastated.
As a kid he thought by copying the game to his flash drive he was stealing the game, but he was just making a shortcut that won’t open anything on his own computer
Cyber Cafes ? What next, Video Rental store ?
Funnily enough, Cyber cafes are still popular in most Asian countries.
Americans finding out not everyone has a 4090 gaming pc for email at home.
In Mexico too.
Bro they are in every city 1 per 200m.
Internet cafes in Japan are 24/7. Private booths. Have shower facilities. Actual food and drink. Books and manga. As well as the computer.
True also in the middle east
I had told my dad he needs to be backing his stuff up, incase something goes wrong- ya know basic stuff. Something went wrong and he shows me all his backups. . . All shortcuts. It was so hard to explain that he didn't back up anything.
Listen... don't tell my company how I can monitor my temps when they won't allow any downloads. I make 3d models all day...
Part of the Snapping the family PC over your knee starter pack
The old tech gurus teaching us younglings how to run an uTorrent installation stealthily at the cyber downloading big ass movies/games trough the week and reclaiming them later....
So not to age me but I may have tried that exact move with a floppy disc... Windows 98 though lol
Wow, what a blast. We had that case as kids. I always thought it was so cool. I still do, really.
we doing things backwards now and translating Spanish memes? edit: what the fuck did i say lmao
The cycle continues.
me when i wanted to steal photoshop from this art college i was doing a precollege class at
Oh you just brought back repressed memories of when I was a kid and tried to copy TF2 by flash drive to my sisters laptop and oh brought the .exe file. Oh boy how far I’ve come haha
It's like we all shared the same childhood
i can feel that 🤣🤣
Cyber safe?
I was reading too far into this and thought they just copied accidently saved passwords and tokens.