Video POTCO Launcher Video

[Bart Gunshot]

I recently remembered the old POTCO launcher video that would play when downloading the game. I managed to find a relatively clean version of this uploaded to Youtube. Other versions I had seen were even worse quality or had recording software watermarks. For fun I ran this through a video upscaler/enlarger with default settings at 4x resolution. I could go higher but even at 4x it wasn't much better than 2x.

This really isn't ideal as the video is already so compressed and low resolution, but its an interesting result nonetheless. I have also replaced the audio tracks I could with higher quality tracks from the game, the first track seems to have only appeared in this video sadly. The upscaler generally produces a more artistic style as its built for mainly anime. I'm sure someone could train a specialized machine learning upscaler to produce much better results with this video but I'm not going to be that person. Anyways, enjoy.

Unfortunately Disney's original video wasn't good quality either because it was streamed to the client from Disney's servers when downloading. This doesn't make any sense whatsoever for Disney to do for a multitude of reasons but hey, its Disney.

The original:

 

[Roger-Daniel]

lol i actually was looking for this recently

 

[squintz]

I recently remembered the old POTCO launcher video that would play when downloading the game. I managed to find a relatively clean version of this uploaded to Youtube. Other versions I had seen were even worse quality or had recording software watermarks. For fun I ran this through a video upscaler/enlarger with default settings at 4x resolution. I could go higher but even at 4x it wasn't much better than 2x.

This really isn't ideal as the video is already so compressed and low resolution, but its an interesting result nonetheless. I have also replaced the tracks I could with higher quality tracks from the game, the first track seems to have only appeared in this video sadly. The upscaler generally produces a more artistic style as its built for mainly anime. I'm sure someone could train a specialized machine learning upscaler to produce much better results with this video but I'm not going to be that person. Anyways, enjoy.

Unfortunately Disney's original video wasn't good quality either because it was streamed to the client from Disney's servers when downloading. This doesn't make any sense whatsoever for Disney to do for a multitude of reasons but hey, its Disney.

The original:

Very nice. Like all multi player games, they scan your computer while downloading, so it's probably safe to assume Disney may have been doing this too, well, they have your best interests at heart aye?
So you know what is that island behind Jolly in the fade out of him scourging bit? About at 1:43 into the vid?

 

[Bart Gunshot]

Very nice. Like all multi player games, they scan your computer while downloading, so it's probably safe to assume Disney may have been doing this too, well, they have your best interests at heart aye?
So you know what is that island behind Jolly in the fade out of him scourging bit? About at 1:43 into the vid?

I highly doubt they scanned your computer, wasn't really a common practice back then as computers weren't as powerful. Also even nowadays thats considered a pretty severe breach of privacy, even though some companies do include this as a clause in their privacy polices and do such things.

I always assumed 1:43 was an edited photo of cuba to appear as if there is glowing town lights on it. However, it could just be a promotional image of the game of an island that was never used.

 

[squintz]

I highly doubt they scanned your computer, wasn't really a common practice back then as computers weren't as powerful. Also even nowadays thats considered a pretty severe breach of privacy, even though some companies do include this as a clause in their privacy polices and do such things.

I always assumed 1:43 was an edited photo of cuba to appear as if there is glowing town lights on it. However, it could just be a promotional image of the game of an island that was never used.

I didn't mean in a malicious way. I know games will scan the folders it has installed to in routine checking for versions and as well as cheat programs, or files that just don't match their records.
They all do.

 

[Bart Gunshot]

I didn't mean in a malicious way. I know games will scan the folders it has installed to in routine checking for versions and as well as cheat programs, or files that just don't match their records.
They all do.

Ah, I see. POTCO unfortunately had almost no protections against cheating. You are right that it verified the game files when launching the launcher, and if the file size of certain files didn't match current records they were redownloaded. However, thats about where it stops. POTCO didn't check currently open programs to see if any cheat programs were open, nor did it validate the game files once the game launched. You could actually swap in modified versions of the game files, including files which contained game code. These are just some of the reasons that hacking and cheating was so prevalent in POTCO. Not to mention the injection exploits due to using poor compilation methods and real-time interpreted python although this is where my knowledge falters on the subject so don't quote me on that.