One-filed games

[oRBIT]

Back in the early days of the Amiga 500, there was this popular trend to "one-file" games. The loaders were replaced and all data was merged to one exe-file and the groups created "compact-disks" with several games on one disk.
Personally I think this was quite cool and actually showed some skill of the crackers/"hackers". :-)
However, the trend of one-file games ended quite fast I think. Anyone know why this happened? Did the modems' on the warez-bbs' got faster so the use of compression wasn't so important anymore?
Anyone on this board that has experience of "one-filing" games? Would be interesting to hear some theories how it was made.

[StingRay]

Originally Posted by oRBIT

However, the trend of one-file games ended quite fast I think. Anyone know why this happened?

The games became larger and more complex and thus single-filing didn't make sense anymore. For a 1 disk game such as Stunt Car Racer which only loads the title picture and then the game and nothing else single-filing made sense.

Originally Posted by oRBIT

Anyone on this board that has experience of "one-filing" games? Would be interesting to hear some theories how it was made.

Single-filing is easy, you only have to patch the loader to copy data to correct memory locations. E.g. if game loads a file to $70000 and another file to $4000 you'd just save these files and replace the loader with a small copyloop, i.e. you'd copy both files to their original memory locations and then just start the game. As simple and easy as it sounds.

[Galahad/FLT]

Yup as Stingray said, games just got big very quickly. More colours, heavier use of 8Bit samples which traditionally don't compress very well.

The Atari ST still had a thriving compact scene because for the most part, samples were not commonly used and the machine displayed less colours.

And like Stingray said, there was actually less skill in single filing, because it meant you could invariably circumvent the copy protection without actually having to do anything tricky.