Can you get the Atari to hurt itself?

[Mclaneinc]

Remember I'm not suggesting that hardware guys put deliberate self destruct mech in the hardware, that's career suicide, but I'm saying as proved by some of the replies that stress testing may not have revealed components that could be over driven to the point of partial failure (a crash) or actual real harm. Things that we now call Easter Eggs are fun little things, but not exactly what I'm looking for. The basis of the thread is that many of the early machines were partially unknown territory and costly or as more machines came out, the competition drove down the cost to produce. It's these factors that interest me as to if things got overlooked in the race to either be first or cheaper cut some corners too close.

 

We have all heard the suggestions that the Apollo space craft range were awarded to the cheapest bidder (not sure if it's 100% true, but some like Gus Grissom protested constantly that corners had been cut, and he paid with his life). Just seeing if the trend continued is a thankfully less dangerous way.

[zzip]

3 hours ago, Mclaneinc said:

Remember I'm not suggesting that hardware guys put deliberate self destruct mech in the hardware, that's career suicide, but I'm saying as proved by some of the replies that stress testing may not have revealed components that could be over driven to the point of partial failure (a crash) or actual real harm

I think systems like Atari were pretty resilient,  you couldn't overclock them via software, There was no firmware you could overwrite via software.   No fans.   The most damage you could do would be to bang the disk head around or print head on a printer. Other systems of the time were similar, although some had bugs that could be exploited to damage them.

[Mclaneinc]

I hope no one minds, I thought that it was a different type of thread, not a "what's your fave game" type things, although those are dead handy for highlighting newer games that are as playable as the usual older suspects. I just thought that there was history there that shows there were machines that were poorly thought out and wondered if there was any connection to the Atari range. Seems there are some cases that while not completely destructive, certainly were not best thought out.

 

And yes, totally agree, the highest accolade for a hacker (to himself) was to cause real problems. When I say hacker, I don't mean a hobby hacker like me who likes to cheat, change stuff, but a career hacker who is a real smart case and loves finding exploits. (yeah I know a cheat is an exploit in simple terms, I just mean a whole system exploit..)

Edited August 3, 2022 by Mclaneinc

[toddtmw]

I think there was a copy program that would continually write the same sector over and over to create a “bad” sector. Did this exist or was this only something I wish existed?

 

I also recall a program that had you put tape on the disk and pull it while it was writing the sector to damage the sector. 

[Mclaneinc]

The tape pull I do remember, not the other one (not even sure it's possible on an unmodded drive), I seem to remember the tape pull being in conjunction with a modded drive??

 

Some person like Nezgar etc can answer (I hope) and expand on the tape one a little.

 

I must say that these were all to aid in creating a working copy or adding protection, I'm more looking for the stuff that did things no one wanted .....<evil laugh ensues>

[ivop]

45 minutes ago, toddtmw said:

I think there was a copy program that would continually write the same sector over and over to create a “bad” sector. Did this exist or was this only something I wish existed?

 

I also recall a program that had you put tape on the disk and pull it while it was writing the sector to damage the sector. 

It was a combination of the two. I remember doing that to break simple one bad sector copy protection without patching. Basically, you copied the disk without the bad sector. Note which sector has to be bad. Then write the sector that has to be bad and push/pull the disk to make it fail to write a proper sector, then read it back to assure it is bad. If not, rinse and repeat.

 

[Britishcar]

This reminds me of the TRS-80 Color Computer 1 & 2 "high speed poke" -- POKE 65495,0 which doubled the CPU clock, ironically to the Atari's 1.79 MHz. This poke really would juice the computer to do just about everything much, much faster but it weirded out other functionality such as cassette and disk I/O. The interesting thing is that there were many warnings not to use this poke commonly as the chips, particularly the 6809 itself, would begin to warm up considerably and many warnings were issued that you could shorten the life of your machine by using it too much...so for at least for the Coco, there might indeed be a sort of killer poke...?