You might recall it from the old days. Cracking group would usually crack,say, a C64 game (the way 90% of us got them), and you’d have this absolutely a-freaking-mazing intro, with bouncing characters and music… then the game would start with it’s lame intro.
Hell, I’ve seen demos on PC’s that are still amazing. Music, vector graphics, what have you, all done in assembler or the like. And it ran on 286’s…
anyone know what I mean?
I know that illegal digitized movies have cracking group intros at the beginning. When I downloaded a cracked full version of Windows 2000 4 months before it came out it had a DOS EXE with scrolling text and stuff.
Saint, I posted about the exact same thing on “Olde School Computer Games” and have noticed it again since dusting off my Commodore emulator and downloading piles of games (17k! what a download!).
Do people still “crack” games like they used to? I mean, yeah they might take off shareware time limits and stuff, but I don’t know if software today is copy-protected like it used to be. There was a time when everything was copy protected and I had a pile of copy programs for the Commodore that I would cycle through, trying to find the one that would copy some game I was borrowing (remember Kwik Kopy?). Even the magazines would be filled with ads for copy programs that would claim to be able to copy the newest games on the market and often listed what they were able to copy. Then everyone started getting upset that they couldn’t back up their games and programs and so the copy protection was lifted some and instead we got beseiged with piles of junk like code wheels and having to find page 32, line 5, word 7 in the player’s guide. I think eventually most companies said “the hell with it” as heavy copy protection was gaining ill will and having to look up words or spin a wheel was just as annoying.
The other big thing was trainers. So many games have various cheat modes now that trainers are pretty much obsolete (not to mention things like the Game Shark for gaming consoles). But back in the day, it was a big thing to crack a game and add a trainer into it.
Finally was the import market. I think intro screens were a bigger deal when you’d get some cracked import from Europe that you were never going to find at Babbages here in the states. I’ve noticed how many of those BBS phone numbers are international.
I miss the intros as well. As often as not, the graphics and music on the intro was better than the game itself and the scrolling text was amusing to read. I even tried to call a few of the numbers (in country), but to get access into the BBS you had to “prove” yourself by saying what games you had cracked and stuff like that. Oh well. I got plenty enough from local sources.
Hey Jo,
Where do I get a Commadore emulator? I would love to play “Ghostbusters” again- the Commadore version.
Zette
Jophiel: That’s what I’m saying. I recall a lot of those games I’d never find anyplace, they’d all be cracked and trained, and usually had better intros than the actual game had. I played Neuromancer on the C64, then found it recently for the IBM, and egads I didn’t realise how far advanced the c64 was over that days IBM!
Kwik Copy, I forgot the one we used, but Peter Norton would have been proud of this guys utilities 
Zette, check the “Olde School Computer Games” thread. I posted several links in there, and-- oh, hell with it. Here they are again.
http://arnold.c64.org/
http://ltd.simplenet.com/c64/games/
Go to the Lemon site (my favorite, by the way because it has screen shots of all the games it offers) and look under Emulators. The best one out there (though not necessarily the easiest) is CCS64 beta. It takes a little bit of tweaking to get it to work as well as it can, but it supports most any games you’ll find and has some great additional features including a “1541 Max Speed” option that allows for fast loading of the games. Let me make myself clear on this. The emulator works exactly like a C= 64. This means it loads files just like a C= 64. Real, real slow. If there’s one thing I bet you don’t miss from your Commodore games, it’s going off to paint your bathroom while the game loaded. Older versions even had the amusing feature of your scroll lock light turning into the 1541 status light and you could watch it flicker while the game loaded. Anyway, that Max Speed option is a godsend (and even it doesn’t make it lightening fast, but it makes a huge difference) and as far as I know the CCS64 is the only emulator to feature it.
Anywho, try it out and if you need any help, you can ask me on #SD.
Amazing? I always thought of them as being lame, repetitive, and quite uninspiring. A bunch of dots and lines and zappy colours bouncing around the screen to stupid music.
Probably where all the rave culture stemmed from, which may explain why I don’t like it. Drug-induced crap.
I say amazing because it was good for what they were working with. C64, 64k memory, 1Mhz Processor, 1541 drive with access time so slow you could go make a sandwitch and a glass of tea, hit the bathroom, walk the dog, whatever before it loaded. And the processor was a real snoozer. But it could do thing the IBM’s couldn’t do until EGA and add in sound cards.