It wasn’t. A lot of the copy protection was the game asking for the word on a particular page and line in the manual. When you pirated the game (which was easy, since it was literally just copying the disk to another disk), you photocopied the manual as well. Or rather photocopied the photocopy of the manual, I didn’t see a lot of original games for the PC and Commodore 64 back in the 80s, but I sure had hundreds if not thousands of games.

I guess the colour thing was probably a method of circumventing the photocopier, because colour photocopiers were not really generally available back then.

Unless you run into particular bios issues like csm and hd formats. It took quite a while and lot of research before I was even able to begin installation, because every distro I tried just hung even before it initiated the process of installing.

The fact that corporations sees the fediverse as inconsequential. The minute people flood it in larger numbers as they are fleeing the corporate entshittified internet, that is exactly what they are going to do though.

That is the way

Late 80s early 90s there were literal adverts in the classified section of the paper by pirates where you could buy 100s of games for a set sum (very cheap usually). Often you mailed empty disks to them and the money, and they would return it with games. They would also have monthly printed newsletters about new titles.

*In the US.

Kenshi, and I still am. Before that it was Stellaris. Singleplayer sandbox with modding is basically what does it for me.