4 ms·

I'm sceptical that the person hacking your console lived in the same apartment complex.

• gaius 12y ago
  Games was a much smaller world back then, and pretty much everyone with a 8-bit system had tried their hand at both writing games and hacking other peoples. When you write assembly language yourself, and own a debugger, then everything is "open source".
  • wiz21 12y ago
    Well, not for me :-) I cracked a few games, looked at someone else's code but I can assure you that at the ASM level, it's very hard to understand that phong-shading routine to the point you can actually re-code it yourself... (yes, I've tried :-)) stF
    • kabdib 12y ago
      Depends on the game. Some games had so few comments that they looked pretty much like a disassembly (Pac-Man for the Atari 800 had exactly two comments in it -- one was a copyright statement, the other was "Ha!", on the critical write-to-ROM for its rather pathetic implementation of copy protection).
• kabdib 12y ago
  175 Calvert Drive in Cupertino. Kind of a dump in the early 80s, probably all condos now [checks . . . nope, still there. Yuck]. I think one of us noticed the other carrying some Atari equipment in the parking lot, and we started chatting. Sure, a bit unlikely, but this was Silly Valley. I think the guy worked for Lockheed and cracking software was a hobby. I kind of had this fellow in mind when I wrote the protection code. I figured it wouldn't stand up very long, and in fact, three days was a moral victory as far as I was concerned. I think he had as much fun with the code as I did :-)
  • rando3826 12y ago
    > Silly Valley Fair enough. I suppose that term will stay in my head now.