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Originally Posted by commodorenutt
The first PC (clone) I had only ran DOS (it was prior to windows).
You had to know your commands, or have a simple menu program like Xtree.
The # 1 pirate command: copy a: *.* b: (when you had 2 floppy drives).
Copy protection? What protection?
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Amazingly, copy protection was around back then. One cheeky way allowed you to freely copy the game with 'copy' but, the original disk was created with certain track/sectors left un-formatted and when the app was run, it would check the disk for the un-formatted disk sectors. This also tripped up bit copiers that copied by track/sector. Not to be outdone, we disassembled the code and found the segment that did the checking and 'jumped' it in a Galaxians clone game I had.
Another was even trickier, same as above but it had self re-writing code after you ran the game. ie, dissasemble the code direct from disk find the section that checked for bad sectors and jump it, but another piece of code writes the checking code when the games was in memory, gave up hacking after that!!
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I still wonder how I ever thought a 10Mb hard drive was big. It held the equivalent of 25-30x 5.25" floppies! I made a slide hammer with the splindle out of that drive - because it was a double-height drive, the spindle was a cylinder of steel around 100mm high x 40mm diameter, with a 10mm hole down the guts. Nice & solid.
The turbo button on them was interesting - it actually worked in reverse (ie with turbo on it ran at its rated speed, and when turbo was off it slowed it down. Was a good cheat mode for games that relied on the processor clock speed, and slowed down as well.
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Yep, the original IBM PC ran at 4.77mhz, turbo off switched the PC back to 4.77mhz. The early games worked at 4.77 and had 'timers' to get around the turbo mode speeding up the game, Microsoft Flight Simulator was once such game, a game commonly used to test 'clones' compatibility!!
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Do you remember the early "rubber cup" modems for the old dial phones?
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Acoustic couplers. First modem I bought was a 300baud job, $199 from Dick Smith back when they sold the TRS-80 clone - System80.
Anyone have a Vic20 or Atari 400/800?
A friend of mine (Todd Hooper) wrote many games for the Vic20, got the Vic 20 as payment from a local computer dealer who sold them onto Imagineering for distribution.
Back in the mid 80's, I Worked with the guy (Gareth Smith) who wrote the Atari game 'Shaft Raider', this game got worldwide distribution and his payment was an Atari 1200 and a printer (same computer dealer as above), he didn't care though, was studying engineering at the time and wrote it for fun.
Todd and I started writing games in assembler for the then new Hitachi MB6890, called 'Peach', dubbed an Apple IIe done right and was crowned computer of the year by APC magazine. Unfortunately, it was a big flop sales wise ($2K back in 84'ish) so the games stopped - first one was a clone of the arcade side scroller 'Moon Patrol'.
Ahh, the good ole days...