Give Yourself More Playtime (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Give Yourself More Playtime (2015)

martinrue.com

100 pointsmartinrue16 comments

I wonder if he really was afraid of the government, or if he was just tried to keep his brother from loading the games. The part where he actually cuts the physical tape is great. The funny thing is that, without cutting the tape, anybody can load the games any way, just like this: Rewind the tape. LOAD the first program (i.e. the password program). Note that the tape is positioned after the password program now. Reset the C64. Enter LOAD to load the actual game.

Or rewind, reset the counter, load the protection, write down the number in one of those math copy books and fast forward to the same number every time. I still have a box full of tapes and those books.

Great story. Also, a great learning experience. This is what I liked about the old times of the C64 and others, they invited so much for these learning experiences. Good old times :)

But even today, many years later and working as a software developer, my greatest source of innovation are the at the beginning goofy ideas and silly experiments.

Reminds me when I wrote my first .COM infecting virus. It worked very well. It infected COMMAND.COM and then the rest of the hard drive. Unfortunately, it had a bug so programs wouldn't work anymore (except command.com).

And I did the test on the PC of a friend of my dad.

A very long moment of loneliness happened to 15 y.o. wannabe hacker when dad and his friend realized the mess :-)

Interesting story, but probably a false memory as Commodore 64 did not auto run programs loaded from tape or disk by default.

Sinclair Spectrum did, but that was also easily be circumventable by using the MERGE command instead of LOAD.

It could auto-run from tape. Take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UoF6_nXMSw

But from disk drive you needed to type LOAD"*",8,1 for it to load into something other than BASIC start address.

If you hit shift+run stop at the end of the command it'd load and run.

I think you could also autorun from disk as everything is memory mapped on the C64, but you couldn’t make it reliable nor portable.

See for instance this page which explores some of the possibilities (and problems)

https://www.pagetable.com/?p=568

Depends on the program being loaded. Tape loaders used by c64 commercial games will autostart to make sure that you can't easily copy. Defeating the tapeloader with the autostart is how you cracked games distributed on tape. The iconic tape loader is Cyberload. A real beast to crack.

http://commodore.software/downloads/download/135-tape-turbo-...

True. I was talking about kernal LOAD and SAVE routines, which the OP seems to have used.

The MERGE command would work if you were loading a normal BASIC program, but quickly you'd learn this didn't work with commercial games.

(Which largely loaded the system variables, and state, since the memory-map was fixed. If you tried to MERGE you'd load those values and your system would crash, reset, or otherwise hang.)

This is a legitimately awesome story---possibly the most delightful thing I've ever read from HN. That is all.

> Eventually I learned that POKE allows you to change values at specific memory addresses

I remember, with my first TI99/4A home computer, reading tons of program listings and trying to port Vic 20, C64, Spectrum, etc programs to it.

Many of the programs had hundreds of peeks and pokes, which the TI99 lacked. I thought it was an additional super power that I was missing. The envy.

I eventually got them with the Mini Memory module and the Extended Basic. Soon I discovered they were not "compatible".

That's an awesome story. "Play around more. Discover things." indeed!

The moral of the story is: Use a password manager.

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