I began this whole adventure by chance, not really by choice. I was introduced to pinball at the ripe old age of 7 by my father. At this point in time there was very little of what you would call electronics. Everything was electrical, but not really electronic. I'm pretty sure that the game that I played was Bally's Mystic Gate.
From the moment I played it, I was hooked on gaming. From there, it was flipper pinball, and eventually Space Invaders. I went through a phase of owning the home video game systems, Atari 2600, 5200, and a few of the Pong variants, but it was the introduction of the home computer that really set my world aflame. I lucked out and managed to get into the "Computer Math" class that my high school was just starting up, and became exposed to BASIC programming. It was the between semester transfer of a kid from another school that had had computers for 2-3 years that really got me going. I was a good BASIC programming student, but NEVER thought outside the box until he arrived. He introduced me to PEEK, and POKE, and showed me how to do some TRULY odd things on our lovely TRS-80 Model 3. He even brought copies of some games for the TRS-80, and gave me copies! The world was a marvelous place! Not only could I play games on the computer, I could get them for free! We had some games show up that we couldn't copy, so I talked the computer teacher into purchasing a copy program for the TRS-80. It was called Clone, and had a unicorn, or pegasus on it's "title screen". My life of piracy had begun!
Over the next 2 years, I got pretty much every TRS-80 game there was, and left copies in the disk box in the computer room. It was amazing how fast the students could get their programming work done when there was a video game payoff at the end. So the teacher didn't object.
During the summers, and most evenings, I spent my time living in an arcade. I was there almost all the time, and came to know the video game mechanic pretty well (Mike). He was 9 years older than me, but we hit it off immediately. I found out that he had just purchased a Commodore VIC-20, and some cartridges, and he invited me over to check it out. Being an EE like he was, he had taken a video game montior, and modified it to accept the composite output that the VIC offered, so his screen was SUPER crisp. We had a good time playing the games, and talking about computers, and then Commodore introduced the Commodore 64. He bought one shortly after, and a floppy drive to go with it. He purchased a few games on floppy, and I told him about how we had copied the games at school using a program called Clone. He picked up a magazine, and low and behold there was an ad for a Commodore Copy Program called Clone. He ordered a copy, and for a while, we were getting software from the stores, copying it, and returning it for a refund. You see, in those days, the stores knew NOTHING about software, and to them it was just another item. So, Toys R Us for example, had a HUGE selection of software, and thought NOTHING about allowing you to return it. To them, it was no different from a bike, or a swimming pool, customer satisfation was guaranteed, so they would refund you with no real hassles. Since computers were relatively big ticket items, almost every store had them. And software to go along with them as an adder. We copied software from: K-Mart, Target, Hill's Department Store, Sears, Toy R Us, and a local mall computer store called P. S. Computers, and probably a bunch that I can't recall. But invariably all good things must end, and so it did with our copying, as we purchased an Electronic Arts game called Archon, and Clone couldn't copy it.
Due to my software knowlege, and Mike's hardware skills, we were quickly accepted as friends at P. S. Computers. It was here that we met a kid who had obtained a copy of a NEW copy program called DiSector 2. Not only would it copy everything we threw at it, but it had a little program called "Arts Backup" that was made specifically for cracking those EA games! So, the quest for all games continued! We started hearing about bulletin board systems (BBSes) where people with C-64s got together, and traded software! It was an amazing thing! We started calling out to the local boards, and trading software (The stuff that we COULD trade, as you couldn't easily trade a still protected game). We met a lot of local people this way, and traded a lot of software. It was a few months later, that I met a kid named Darren, (Dr. Who as his BBS name was). He was experimenting with removing the copy protection from games so that they could be uploaded to the BBSes. What he called "cracking". So, we sat down at Mike's house, and he showed me how to crack a couple of games that he had done before, and I was in love! No, not with him, with cracking! By this time Mike's floppy disk box was FULL of copied, uncracked games, so Mike would pick me up at my parent's house on Friday night, and I would hack until he got up on Sunday morning, and took me home. (Where I would go to sleep, and sleep until school time on Monday). I cracked A LOT of stuff, and began to get quite the reputation amongst the locals in Nashville. So much so that Darren began to resent me as HE had taught me how, and here *I* was becoming famous for it. This came to a head when P.S. Computers got in a new game, and decided to have a showdown between us. The game was Gamestar Football. It took me a few hours at Mike's house to get it done, but I had it done before P.S. Computers opened the next day, and more importantly before Darren had. (I even put my name on the scoreboard that showed at the start of the game.) Just to be complete, the first game that I ever cracked was an accident. Before Darren showed me how to do it the correct way, I was playing the copied games from the disk box, and was loading up "Scroll of Abadon" by Access Software, when I remembered that it sucked. So, I pressed "Run/Stop" RESTORE (the equivalent of CTRL-C on a DOS app), and it returned to the READY prompt. Well, being curious, I did the automatic response "list", and a small BASIC program was displayed to the screen. This was puzzling, as the loader for the game was an assembly language app. I threw in a blank disk, and tried to save it. It wouldn't save (Disk drive was probably in the middle of checking the protection or something when I stopped the program, leaving it in a weird state). I tried to PRINT it to the printer, that wouldn't work. (It never occured to me to unplug the power to the floppy drive, and reset it). So, I found some paper, and a pen, and transcribed it from the monitor. Once I had it down, I cycled power on the 64, and typed it back in with the game disk in the drive. It loaded and played the game! That was cool! So, I file copied the files from the game disk to the blank I mentioned earlier. (so as to NOT copy the bad sectors used for the protection over). Once this was done, I ran my typed in program on the NEW disk, and it ran. Woohoo I had cracked a game. Albeit by complete accident, but it still counted! :-)
And thus began my cracking career.
Over the next 2 years, I got pretty much every TRS-80 game there was, and left copies in the disk box in the computer room. It was amazing how fast the students could get their programming work done when there was a video game payoff at the end. So the teacher didn't object.
During the summers, and most evenings, I spent my time living in an arcade. I was there almost all the time, and came to know the video game mechanic pretty well (Mike). He was 9 years older than me, but we hit it off immediately. I found out that he had just purchased a Commodore VIC-20, and some cartridges, and he invited me over to check it out. Being an EE like he was, he had taken a video game montior, and modified it to accept the composite output that the VIC offered, so his screen was SUPER crisp. We had a good time playing the games, and talking about computers, and then Commodore introduced the Commodore 64. He bought one shortly after, and a floppy drive to go with it. He purchased a few games on floppy, and I told him about how we had copied the games at school using a program called Clone. He picked up a magazine, and low and behold there was an ad for a Commodore Copy Program called Clone. He ordered a copy, and for a while, we were getting software from the stores, copying it, and returning it for a refund. You see, in those days, the stores knew NOTHING about software, and to them it was just another item. So, Toys R Us for example, had a HUGE selection of software, and thought NOTHING about allowing you to return it. To them, it was no different from a bike, or a swimming pool, customer satisfation was guaranteed, so they would refund you with no real hassles. Since computers were relatively big ticket items, almost every store had them. And software to go along with them as an adder. We copied software from: K-Mart, Target, Hill's Department Store, Sears, Toy R Us, and a local mall computer store called P. S. Computers, and probably a bunch that I can't recall. But invariably all good things must end, and so it did with our copying, as we purchased an Electronic Arts game called Archon, and Clone couldn't copy it.
Due to my software knowlege, and Mike's hardware skills, we were quickly accepted as friends at P. S. Computers. It was here that we met a kid who had obtained a copy of a NEW copy program called DiSector 2. Not only would it copy everything we threw at it, but it had a little program called "Arts Backup" that was made specifically for cracking those EA games! So, the quest for all games continued! We started hearing about bulletin board systems (BBSes) where people with C-64s got together, and traded software! It was an amazing thing! We started calling out to the local boards, and trading software (The stuff that we COULD trade, as you couldn't easily trade a still protected game). We met a lot of local people this way, and traded a lot of software. It was a few months later, that I met a kid named Darren, (Dr. Who as his BBS name was). He was experimenting with removing the copy protection from games so that they could be uploaded to the BBSes. What he called "cracking". So, we sat down at Mike's house, and he showed me how to crack a couple of games that he had done before, and I was in love! No, not with him, with cracking! By this time Mike's floppy disk box was FULL of copied, uncracked games, so Mike would pick me up at my parent's house on Friday night, and I would hack until he got up on Sunday morning, and took me home. (Where I would go to sleep, and sleep until school time on Monday). I cracked A LOT of stuff, and began to get quite the reputation amongst the locals in Nashville. So much so that Darren began to resent me as HE had taught me how, and here *I* was becoming famous for it. This came to a head when P.S. Computers got in a new game, and decided to have a showdown between us. The game was Gamestar Football. It took me a few hours at Mike's house to get it done, but I had it done before P.S. Computers opened the next day, and more importantly before Darren had. (I even put my name on the scoreboard that showed at the start of the game.) Just to be complete, the first game that I ever cracked was an accident. Before Darren showed me how to do it the correct way, I was playing the copied games from the disk box, and was loading up "Scroll of Abadon" by Access Software, when I remembered that it sucked. So, I pressed "Run/Stop" RESTORE (the equivalent of CTRL-C on a DOS app), and it returned to the READY prompt. Well, being curious, I did the automatic response "list", and a small BASIC program was displayed to the screen. This was puzzling, as the loader for the game was an assembly language app. I threw in a blank disk, and tried to save it. It wouldn't save (Disk drive was probably in the middle of checking the protection or something when I stopped the program, leaving it in a weird state). I tried to PRINT it to the printer, that wouldn't work. (It never occured to me to unplug the power to the floppy drive, and reset it). So, I found some paper, and a pen, and transcribed it from the monitor. Once I had it down, I cycled power on the 64, and typed it back in with the game disk in the drive. It loaded and played the game! That was cool! So, I file copied the files from the game disk to the blank I mentioned earlier. (so as to NOT copy the bad sectors used for the protection over). Once this was done, I ran my typed in program on the NEW disk, and it ran. Woohoo I had cracked a game. Albeit by complete accident, but it still counted! :-)
And thus began my cracking career.
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