by Flack » Wed Sep 04, 2019 8:24 pm
In the late 80s, my "cracking group" (OKK -- the OK Krackers) was going hot and heavy. There were two founding members of OKK, me and my friend Paladin, and then several other people we added to the group because they were friends of ours. Unfortunately, we were a cracking group full of people who didn't know how to crack software. Instead, we used every trick in the book to make it look like we did. We downloaded games from out of state BBSes and changed the intros or added our own cracking screen in front of whatever was already there. In the original Battle Chess, the copy protection required players to look up the winning move in a chess game and enter it (A2A4). We used a hex editor to change every one of them to OKK!. Stuff like that.
Eventually we found these cheap "demo maker" programs that would allow us to make demos without knowing how to program at all. We kept those programs close to the chest. We would type in long scrolling messages, greeting real and imaginary people, add music we didn't make, steal someone's picture and add it as a background... I was a pretty shifty kid. But it made it look like we knew what we were doing.
Anyway, Paladin was maybe 30 years older than me with more disposable income than I (as a teenager) had and he ended up buying DigiView (I think), which was a video digitizer for the Commodore 64. I don't remember much about it but I remember that at the highest resolution (320x200) it only did 4 colors (black and 3 shades of gray). So pictures of people didn't always look great but line artwork worked really well, and eventually we hit on the idea of scanning in pictures from old D&D manuals. We could scan in a black and white drawing and then build a "demo" around it. And these things would be like 200 blocks or whatever -- a third of a floppy disk, and then we would upload them everywhere and get credits and people thought we were programming geniuses. Later I found this public domain program that allowed you to capture audio from a datasette and play it back as digitized speech, and we were able to tack that on as well.
A couple of years after that, my friend Justin sold his C64 and got an Amiga. He was the first person I knew who actually had one. He would call BBSes and download disk after disk of digiized pictures and then I would drive over to his house after work and we would just sit there and click on every one and be amazed. "THAT LOOKS JUST LIKE A SAILBOAT!" "THAT ONE LOOKS JUST LIKE THE MOON!" "THAT IS AN AMAZING PICTURE OF A CORVETTE!" We didn't give a shit what the pictures were of. It was just so amazing to see digital pictures on a computer screen in more than 4 colors that we would look at them forever.
My PC BBS, The Gas Chamber, went online in 1994. I added as many hard drives as I could afford. I even added a six-disc CD changer, and burned six CD-R discs full of "warez" (at $10/blank) so that I could have all that storage online. When I told people I had "GIGS" of storage, they called me a liar!
I had callers from all over Oklahoma and lots of long distance ones, too, but the lure of the internet was too great. To keep people from abandoning my BBS, I started downloading anything I could find on the internet and adding it to my BBS. I'm not just talking about warez like games and stuff -- I'm talking about midi/mod/wav files, text files, and yeah, graphic files. I did not have the Red Dwarf logo, but I had plenty of other things. I had one area for Awesome 80s pictures, one for Star Wars stuff, and one for cartoon related pix. It didn't quite have the "WOW" factor it did on the Amiga, but it was still amazing how many would scroll through my file areas and download random pictures of Scooby Doo or a TIE Fighter. It didn't keep people from abandoning BBSes forever, but it kept them around for a little while.
Where was I? Oh, yeah. Sorry about your game. Wikipedia sucks.
In the late 80s, my "cracking group" (OKK -- the OK Krackers) was going hot and heavy. There were two founding members of OKK, me and my friend Paladin, and then several other people we added to the group because they were friends of ours. Unfortunately, we were a cracking group full of people who didn't know how to crack software. Instead, we used every trick in the book to make it look like we did. We downloaded games from out of state BBSes and changed the intros or added our own cracking screen in front of whatever was already there. In the original Battle Chess, the copy protection required players to look up the winning move in a chess game and enter it (A2A4). We used a hex editor to change every one of them to OKK!. Stuff like that.
Eventually we found these cheap "demo maker" programs that would allow us to make demos without knowing how to program at all. We kept those programs close to the chest. We would type in long scrolling messages, greeting real and imaginary people, add music we didn't make, steal someone's picture and add it as a background... I was a pretty shifty kid. But it made it look like we knew what we were doing.
Anyway, Paladin was maybe 30 years older than me with more disposable income than I (as a teenager) had and he ended up buying DigiView (I think), which was a video digitizer for the Commodore 64. I don't remember much about it but I remember that at the highest resolution (320x200) it only did 4 colors (black and 3 shades of gray). So pictures of people didn't always look great but line artwork worked really well, and eventually we hit on the idea of scanning in pictures from old D&D manuals. We could scan in a black and white drawing and then build a "demo" around it. And these things would be like 200 blocks or whatever -- a third of a floppy disk, and then we would upload them everywhere and get credits and people thought we were programming geniuses. Later I found this public domain program that allowed you to capture audio from a datasette and play it back as digitized speech, and we were able to tack that on as well.
A couple of years after that, my friend Justin sold his C64 and got an Amiga. He was the first person I knew who actually had one. He would call BBSes and download disk after disk of digiized pictures and then I would drive over to his house after work and we would just sit there and click on every one and be amazed. "THAT LOOKS JUST LIKE A SAILBOAT!" "THAT ONE LOOKS JUST LIKE THE MOON!" "THAT IS AN AMAZING PICTURE OF A CORVETTE!" We didn't give a shit what the pictures were of. It was just so amazing to see digital pictures on a computer screen in more than 4 colors that we would look at them forever.
My PC BBS, The Gas Chamber, went online in 1994. I added as many hard drives as I could afford. I even added a six-disc CD changer, and burned six CD-R discs full of "warez" (at $10/blank) so that I could have all that storage online. When I told people I had "GIGS" of storage, they called me a liar!
I had callers from all over Oklahoma and lots of long distance ones, too, but the lure of the internet was too great. To keep people from abandoning my BBS, I started downloading anything I could find on the internet and adding it to my BBS. I'm not just talking about warez like games and stuff -- I'm talking about midi/mod/wav files, text files, and yeah, graphic files. I did not have the Red Dwarf logo, but I had plenty of other things. I had one area for Awesome 80s pictures, one for Star Wars stuff, and one for cartoon related pix. It didn't quite have the "WOW" factor it did on the Amiga, but it was still amazing how many would scroll through my file areas and download random pictures of Scooby Doo or a TIE Fighter. It didn't keep people from abandoning BBSes forever, but it kept them around for a little while.
Where was I? Oh, yeah. Sorry about your game. Wikipedia sucks.