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The masters of Commodore 64 games
- JohnKemeny 2y ago[flagged]
- JohnKemeny 2y agoPRESS PLAY ON TAPE
- bsdooby 2y agoLOAD"*",8,1
- aSithLord 2y ago[dead]
- ryandrake 2y agoThe part about the "copy protection" schemes was sad/amusing. So much work put into cracking and anti-cracking, and even cracking for the purpose of legitimate distribution, and wasting memory on profanity-soaked rants to the hackers... Everyone involved in the story looks back at it as "fun" and "challenging" but all I see is wasted time on everyone's part and software that is more difficult to use. Here we are, 40 years later, and DRM is still with us and they're still hopelessly trying.
- classichasclass 2y agoThe C64 protection methods that drove me most up the wall were V-MAX! and Rapidlok, especially since V-MAX! existed in several different variations. Man, those were a pain. Harald Seeley (Alien Technology Group, who developed V-MAX! and WarpSpeed, and did a number of ports for companies like Cinemaware, was in my hometown of San Diego) eventually explained a lot of the tricks later on. Some good discussion here https://diskpreservation.rittwage.com/?pg=vmax https://diskpreservation.rittwage.com/?pg=vmax and here https://diskpreservation.rittwage.com/dp.php?pg=rapidlok https://diskpreservation.rittwage.com/dp.php?pg=rapidlok .
- aaronbaugher 2y agoThey "worked" in the sense that, when I managed to save up for a game on my minimum-wage salary, I bought a game that none of my friends had a cracked copy of. I remember buying EA's Caveman Ughlympics for that reason (it also came with some cool extras in the box). But it didn't work in the sense of making me buy more games. I had hundreds of copied games and a couple dozen purchased ones, and if copy protection had been perfect, I would have had a couple dozen. The publishers always acted like I would have purchased the hundreds, which was impossible. So it was really a competition between the publishers to out-protect the others more than between the publishers and the customers.
- wiz21c 2y agoespecially in the time of 0-day warez. Interestingly, many thrived on the ShareWare business models (including John Carmack IIRC)
- deleted 2y ago
- rmb177 2y agoSpelunker, M.U.L.E, Seven Cities of Gold, Up N Down, Moon Patrol, Raid on Bungeling Bay, Blue Max I could go on and on...
- hotsauceror 2y agoM.U.L.E., Bungeling Bay, Mission Impossible, Racing Destruction Set and Ultima IV were our go-tos.
- gramie 2y agoI think you mean "Impossible Mission"!
- ipaddr 2y agoLove the mission impossible voice
- jbperry 2y agoStay a while, Stay forever! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1_fDwX1VVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1_fDwX1VVY
- TacticalCoder 2y ago[dead]
- muziq 2y agoRoBB was something truly special!
- fodi 2y agoFor anyone else feeling a good hit of nostalgia, I highly recommend this excellent site with C64 games playable in the browser - and with netplay too! https://c64.krissz.hu/online-playable-games/ https://c64.krissz.hu/online-playable-games/
- ecairns 2y agoThank you for this. I'm going to play some M.U.L.E. tonight after work.
- jimt1234 2y agoI often wonder about nostalgia related to computers/computing. It's strange because, even though I spent countless hours on my Commodore 64 as a teenager, and it had a major influence on my life (it basically introduced me to programming and set the course for my professional life), I just don't feel the nostalgia vibes. I got my hands on an old C64 a few years ago and fired it up. I tinkered with it for about 10 minutes and lost interest. It just felt lame, a complete waste of time. It was surprising to me, considering how important the C64 has been in my life. Also, I feel that way about pretty much all old computer/computing devices. I've got an old laptops, iPods, iPhones, and even the original Rio PMP300 mp3 player, but I don't really feel any real nostalgia or love for them. It's like they were just tools I used, like a hammer or screwdriver, and that's it. Contrast that with my love of older cars. I love finding old cars on Craigslist, taking them home and tinkering with them, restoring them. It makes me feel like I'm cool, driving a mid-80s Honda CRX or something similar. I have no idea why that is; I was never a "car guy" until I got older. But, like I said, I often wonder why I have nostalgia vibes for one old thing (cars), but not another (computers), especially when one has had a much greater impact on my life. I wonder if it's society - that is, American culture has always had a major boner for cars and I'm being influenced by that. Or, maybe it's because "computers" have been my profession for the last 30 years, and that has killed my love for them. Not sure. BTW, no disrespect to those who do get nostalgia vibes for the C64 an other older devices. Just the opposite - much respect.
- rightbyte 2y agoFor some reason I share that view. Maybe it is since computers got so much better? I got way more nostalgia for NES, which I still think is fun to play and play with my kids. Super Mario still feels good while C64 games feel clunky.
- TMWNN 2y agoClarification siince the author does not mention this specifically: Disk drives dominated the C64 storage market in the US, Canada, and Germany, while cassette dominated the UK and elsewhere. Thus, US Gold had to convert US disk games to cassette for the UK market; I presume that the rushed jobs the article mentions were for especially popular games, or when there was an unusually short contractual deadline for delivery. Given how slow the native Commodore disk drive is, one can imagine how much more painful loading a designed-for-disk game from cassette. Games were often abridged to fit. That said, this meant that slow disk transfer was not a handicap for C64 in the UK. Since tape was the medium of choice for ZX Spectrum and other rivals, C64 was on a level playing field. If anything C64 still had the advantage, because the Commodore Datasette is a digital format and very reliable, while Spectrum and US rivals like Apple and TRS-80 use analog formats and are incredibly unreliable that made people cry, groan, moan, and curse. Apple II's tape storage is also analog, but Disk II caused the Apple market to very soon move to disk-only (and Disk II is perhaps the greatest of Woz's many late-1970s engineering triumphs) so it didn't matter. Three things I am unclear on: * The extent of the above-mentioned abridgement process. My understanding is that both cosmetic things like loading screens, and sometimes entire portions like (say) a couple of the sports in the Epyx Games series, were removed. I don't know if there is a compendium of the abridgements; I don't see the information at Lemon64, but perhaps I missed it. * Why software crackers had to crack cassette games in the first place, given that they can be duplicated with any dual-bay tape deck. Was there a reason other than to say they could do it (see next point), and perhaps to allow for cheating? * The extent of crack intros for cassette games. In the US, crackers (then and now) put small animations before loading to announce themselves send greetings to friends and rivals. I'm sure this happened in the UK but the medium no doubt restricted the intros' size.
- Jolter 2y agoI think cracking had at least two reasons. 1. There was a lot of exotic copy protection going on, especially on disk. Putting data in sectors that could not be written by the standard disk copying methods was just the beginning. I don’t know if any copy protection of tapes was ever effective but I wouldn’t be surprised. 2. To enable the use of “turbo” loaders. Cassette games were released on standard cassettes that were maybe shorter than normal. But if you compressed the games using better algorithms, you could fit up to 20 games on one side of a standard audio cassette. Normally the turbo loader was placed first on the cassette. It would maybe take a minute or two to load. Then, the rest of the pirated games followed. You’d write down the index number of each game on the cassette cover so you could fast-forward to it. The reason this was called “turbo” was presumably because as the game took up less space on the tape, you didn’t have to wait as long for it to roll past the read head. The c64 could decompress the data faster than the Datasette could play it back, so there was no processing wait. Most likely even a game that could be copied straight over to another cassette, still had copy protection that prevented it from loading using a different loader than it was mastered for. Hence it needed to be cracked.
- finchisko 2y agoOh this bring back memories. As during communist era, there were no extra money or even stores where to buy. So we copied casettes. First load game then save on blank cassete. This worked for almost all games, but one. That one instead of waiting for run or save command, started game immediately. So only way to copy was using double decker. But most of double deckers were shitty. Adding so much noise, that copy didn’t work. I remember visiting one friend that has high quality deck, that was able to make a workable copy.
- gdedhitchhiker 2y ago[flagged]