4 ms·

Don't you mean a Commodore pirate's story?

by nla 8y ago

PhasmaFelis 8y ago
Breaking copy protection certainly involved hacking, ditto making impressive intros. A lot of groups would add cheats too.
- Annatar 8y ago
  Hacking is putting something together quickly, just enough so that it barely works. Bypassing, disabling, removing a copy protection or extracting the data from a protected medium is cracking, the metaphor being that the protection cracked as glass would have. Those had to work perfectly, and they were often bug fixed, trained and level-packed as well as single-sided, thus making them better, faster and smaller than the original. That's not a hack.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    In my mind hacking is fiddling with things with a vague end result in mind and learning as you go. I think a lot of cracking falls into this category.
    - Annatar 8y ago
      Not a chance. There was no fiddling, and the end result was crystal clear: disable copy protection and release the cracked version before any of the other groups do. For lots of commercial copy protections, the steps or concepts to disable them were well understood.
  - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    > Hacking is putting something together quickly, just enough so that it barely works. That's one definition of a hack. The word famously has many different meanings depending on context. http://catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html
    - Annatar 8y ago
      Yes, but that's the original and correct one, true to its English language roots. It's what people here do a lot as opposed to system engineering.
Annatar 8y ago
And what a glorious, joyous life it was! I'm proud of having been a software pirate. It was a great time, especially if one was a computer enthusiast like I was. 1987 on a Commodore64. If you were into computers, probably the only other place better than that was on UNIX, but no teenager in Europe heard of UNIX until the mid '90's, and then we went straight onto Sun Microsystems Solaris. 1993 and the first machine was a SPARCStation 20 with 256 MB of RAM, four processors and 40 GB of disk. We were so very, very fortunate. And then came the Amiga (after Commodore64, but before Suns). If the atmosphere was phenomenal before, the joy now became stratospheric with what we could do on that machine. Sun systems were of course on a whole new plane of existence compared to the Amiga we knew and loved.
dep_b 8y ago
We had fantastic access to the latest releases (Venlo) but still bought games from time to time. Games weren't that expensive to begin with and came with a nice box and manual. Lots of cracked C64 games were unplayable to me because I didn't know about some kind of exotic move joystick left right while keeping fire button depressed movement to be executed at just the right place.

Don't you mean a Commodore pirate's story?

by nla 8y ago

Don't you mean a Commodore pirate's story?

Breaking copy protection certainly involved hacking, ditto making impressive intros. A lot of groups would add cheats too.

Annatar 8y ago
Hacking is putting something together quickly, just enough so that it barely works. Bypassing, disabling, removing a copy protection or extracting the data from a protected medium is cracking, the metaphor being that the protection cracked as glass would have. Those had to work perfectly, and they were often bug fixed, trained and level-packed as well as single-sided, thus making them better, faster and smaller than the original. That's not a hack.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  In my mind hacking is fiddling with things with a vague end result in mind and learning as you go. I think a lot of cracking falls into this category.
  - Annatar 8y ago
    Not a chance. There was no fiddling, and the end result was crystal clear: disable copy protection and release the cracked version before any of the other groups do. For lots of commercial copy protections, the steps or concepts to disable them were well understood.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  > Hacking is putting something together quickly, just enough so that it barely works. That's one definition of a hack. The word famously has many different meanings depending on context. http://catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html
  - Annatar 8y ago
    Yes, but that's the original and correct one, true to its English language roots. It's what people here do a lot as opposed to system engineering.

Annatar 8y ago

And what a glorious, joyous life it was! I'm proud of having been a software pirate. It was a great time, especially if one was a computer enthusiast like I was. 1987 on a Commodore64. If you were into computers, probably the only other place better than that was on UNIX, but no teenager in Europe heard of UNIX until the mid '90's, and then we went straight onto Sun Microsystems Solaris. 1993 and the first machine was a SPARCStation 20 with 256 MB of RAM, four processors and 40 GB of disk. We were so very, very fortunate. And then came the Amiga (after Commodore64, but before Suns). If the atmosphere was phenomenal before, the joy now became stratospheric with what we could do on that machine. Sun systems were of course on a whole new plane of existence compared to the Amiga we knew and loved.

dep_b 8y ago

We had fantastic access to the latest releases (Venlo) but still bought games from time to time. Games weren't that expensive to begin with and came with a nice box and manual. Lots of cracked C64 games were unplayable to me because I didn't know about some kind of exotic move joystick left right while keeping fire button depressed movement to be executed at just the right place.