What was the first game you ever PIRATED

[+bf2k+]

... and getting into the phreaking scene somewhat, I programmed a simple program in atari basic that would call the local MCI or SPRINT access # and keep trying incremental codes, when a code worked it would dial a the local Compuserve # and send a record to the printer. If you left your computer on all night you would end up with a print out of about 5 or 10 codes.

...

 

That wasn't LD Bandit by any chance was it?

[Warriorisabouttodie]

... and getting into the phreaking scene somewhat, I programmed a simple program in atari basic that would call the local MCI or SPRINT access # and keep trying incremental codes, when a code worked it would dial a the local Compuserve # and send a record to the printer. If you left your computer on all night you would end up with a print out of about 5 or 10 codes.

...

 

That wasn't LD Bandit by any chance was it?

 

 

I don't remember what I called it, but I did upload the program to many bbs's. There were several programs of that type for various systems. I based mine or got the idea from a similar program a friend had on his Apple IIe. I also made a program for the 8bits that emitted the tones used for alliance conferencing and "free calls" it was a red, silver and blue box (I think that was it) emulator. I remember as like a 12 year old kid calling up Analog magazine and asking advice on how to get a pure tone generated. I also remember bugging the hell out of the guy who wrote the Amis bbs software for information on programming the device handler for the 835/1030 proprietary modems. I used to really admire and get advice from the guy who later wrote an article for Antic regarding the 1030 modem and invented a cool bbs program that accessed the extended memory on a 800xl from basic he lived in Torrence CA and had a bbs called Modrona Marsh which at the time was the slickest thing on the 8bit.

 

Another simple program I made was a war dialer like in the movie Wargames. I found a lot of wierd computers back then including the local tv station, but fortunately was not able to launch any missles. I created a program that would attempt to hack out Compuserve passwords but you needed to manually enter a dictionary to provide the program with enough words (at that time there was no word processing software for the 8bit that supported a spellcheck for me to steal the dictionary from). It worked in theory but probably would of taken a year to find a pw.

 

Atari Basic was a very accessible language so that even a child with limited access to reference manuals could learn from other program listings enough to make stand alone programs. Even compared to modern languags that are fairly easy like Python I believe Atari Basic was better in the sense of what you could of get out of it. It's too bad someone doesnt write something that doesnt require a myriad of libraries and tons of studying to write a semi-professional program.

 

NOTE: I dont endorse pirating or any of that crazy stuff we used to do back then anymore (most of which would amount to fraud or worse). I am a collector and player of vintage/modern games which I pay for, but back then I didnt have any money to begin with, so really no one was losing out(not that I really understood the concept of property back then) but I can see now (and indeed realized in the late 80's) that the A8bit platform was killed off because of the very organized pirating that ran rampant within the Atari bbs community. It was a sad day when all the software developers in the North America market jumped ship on Atari (or limited their efforts to piss poor ports from the c64). It was especially sad when the c64 platform still went strong for many years and the Atari was limited to bad ports, public domain games, and a trickle of Euro imports (like Zybex).

Edited November 1, 2008 by Warriorisabouttodie

[MN12BIRD]

I'm guessing Monkey Island 2. I didn't get a PC until like 1993 and I think that was the first game that got passed around my circle of friends.

[+David_P]

COSMIC BALANCE was the first game I ever broke the protection on - a bad sector, so I used a disk editor to set the seek to zero to get the error (I think - it's been quite some time).

 

I don't recall the name of the first game I downloaded, but I do recall that it was at 300 baud, took forever!!! and then I discovered it was XL/XE only; I was still running an 800!

[Prodos8]

Not Atari --- but I beleive my first pirates were Apple II versions of Ulitma III and Stellar 7. This was around 1983, so the statute of limititations is surely up.

[akator]

I think mine were all Apple II games. At first my father got the games from people at work, but most of the games had a demo screen. A year later I was copying games using Beagle Bros. software from the computer lab at the local college.

 

Too bad I don't have any of those disks anymore...

Edited November 1, 2008 by akator

[Shannon]

I dunno. I knew a few people that had C64's and they had no shortage of pirated software either.

 

I remember downloading from BBS's at a measely 300 bps and getting files with bad data. This was back when Xmodem was the most used. Well when I was working with BBS software (forget which it was) for someone I dissassembled the Xmodem code and discovered that whoever coded it was not even bothering to calculate the CRC on receives and would just send an ACK to confirm that everything was ok with the packet.

[+bf2k+]

I remember 300 baud = $500/month phone bills!!

 

And I had an MPP that would do a whopping 450 baud... if I could ever find a BBS running one also!

[Tickled_Pink]

Don't know for sure. A friend had a mass of Rob C menu disks. I met him through a school friend who'd got himself an 800XL arounf the same time as I did. He lent me a Rob C menu which probably had something like Tail of Beta Lyrae on it ... I promptly ended up accidentally formatting it.

[oesii]

I had a tape drive for about 2 years before I got a disk drive for my Atari 800. But I don't remember pirating anything at all on tape, in fact I spent most of my time programming my own games in Basic and trying to learning some assembly language. But all that was shot when I got a 1050 drive and then my friends would give me dozens of games a month and I didn't bother making my own games and apps as much. See piracy does suck

 

I think one of the first games I used as a copy was One on One Basketball with Bird and Dr. J.

[eegad]

COSMIC BALANCE was the first game I ever broke the protection on - a bad sector, so I used a disk editor to set the seek to zero to get the error (I think - it's been quite some time).

 

I don't recall the name of the first game I downloaded, but I do recall that it was at 300 baud, took forever!!! and then I discovered it was XL/XE only; I was still running an 800!

 

 

Just reminded me of something.... did anybody else used to use the "scotch tape / yank" method to copy games? When they first started using just one or two bad sectors as copy protection, the easy way around that was to sector copy the disk, and make note of the bad sector. Put a piece of tape on the end of the disk copy so the tape hung out the drive slot, write a quick program to just keep writing any old data to that sector, and then give the tape a quick yank, thus jamming and stopping the disk in mid-write. An error resulted on that sector and the copy worked fine. Copied a handful of games that way.

 

A side question while on the this taboo topic. What was the hardest game you ever personally cracked? Or the most interesting/ingenious protection you ever came across?

 

I'll start.

 

Alternate Reality - City. Hard & ingenious. Funny thing is that I already a bought the game (had it on pre-order many months before it was released). But I wanted a backup copy for myself. I also owed a friend or two for giving me copies of things, so I wanted to pay off the debt. For like an entire week after getting the game, I kept at it. Finally got it, but it was annoying. Multiple fuzzy sectors, multiple load stages, scrambled data (it would load a chunk of data, then a second chunk of data, then EOR byte by byte to another area of ram, which would then unscramble into executable code....definitely "protection from paradise", which was text encoded on the disk somewhere). Anyway, when i finally cracked it, I changed the lyrics of the opening song to something about how hard it was to crack. My friend got a kick out of it anyway, and I was pleased that I figured it out.

 

I also was impressed early on when I figured out how to copy Atari cartridges. Had a program to dump an area of ram to disk. Figured if I added the disk load sector headers to it, you could easily copy a cart. Didn't work. Blew my mind how that could be. Disassembled a cart or two and started tracing through it. Figured maybe there was a bit set somewhere that marked whether a cart was inserted or not. Nope. Found a small loop in the initialization code that wrote some data to memory locations where the cart resided. I was like "What the...? How can you write to that area if it's rom when the cart is in? Ohhhhhh....... if the cart dump is in ram, it wipes out parts of the game code! if it's an actual rom, nothing happens and the game continues running." Definitely an "aha!" moment.

Edited November 1, 2008 by eegad

[Shannon]

I had a tape drive for about 2 years before I got a disk drive for my Atari 800. But I don't remember pirating anything at all on tape, in fact I spent most of my time programming my own games in Basic and trying to learning some assembly language. But all that was shot when I got a 1050 drive and then my friends would give me dozens of games a month and I didn't bother making my own games and apps as much. See piracy does suck

I had this issue as well. My programming cut back quite a bit once I got a disk drive and found a source. Actually I think BBS's hurt the most with all the time spent on them. Between the msg boards and downloading my Atari was pretty tied up. Luckily my brother bought one himself so I could use his while mine was connected.

 

Great days!

[chuckwalla]

To be more or less on topic, a few weeks after getting my C64 setup, I got a little gift from a family friend who brought over a 5-1/4" diskette case full of pirated games. It took hours to copy the disks but it was worth it. Among the first was Jumpman, Bandits, Dino Eggs, Choplifter, Star Trek simulators (probably considered garbage today but back then it was cool to move the Enterprise around the "coordinates" that made up the galaxy and fire phasers & photon torpedoes at Klingon ships), Neutral Zone, Raid over Moscow, miscellaneous adventure games, and Sargon III chess (which I still play once in a while on the CCS64 emulator.

 

I played the hell out of those games back then and it was an awesome time. Can't do that kind of pirating anymore, and back then software companies didn't earn the big $$$ they do now.