The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Six

If you read The Kwiksave Chronicles of Slobberchops , then I can tell you this is going to be in a similar vein to that series. Yeah, it's going to go on and on and maybe never end. Ready?

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The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops will go into some detail over the next few weeks.. er article's about part of my life when I was young, misguided and brash.

Like many, I was once a Software Pirate. That's not unusual in itself but I have a few stories to tell about what happened, and I'll try and not bore you all to tears.

Other article's in this series:


The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part One
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Two
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Three
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Four
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Five

I owned an Atari ST for just four months. I had never had a computer for such a short period of time, but in that period, I met a young lad who had virtually no personality and like me was on a mission to copy every piece of software known to mankind.

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This 'no personality' thing seemed to be a recurring theme, and so ‘Adam’ joined me for several trips to Manchester for copying sessions. It was also this stunted speeched whippersnapper who introduced me to the local Amiga pirate distribution network underworld boss.

‘I know someone who owns an Amiga’, confessed Adam in one of his more verbose moments.

The next thing, we were off to said contacts house without an invitation.

Fortunately, Adam had been before, but for what reason I have no idea considering he owned a ‘rival’ computer.

I was introduced to this big burly bloke with few teeth and vile deadly breath. He would later be known as ‘Walrus Breath'; a highly apt name but not one created by yours truly. Despite his fearsome appearance, Walrus was a highly likeable chap of probably ten years my senior.

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'Walrus' was also a self-confessed football hooligan and loved to boast about his exploits of kicking the arses of away fans, and sometimes sitting in jail for a night as recompense.

I remember many a time listening with stoic indifference to the hooligan exploits and tales he used to spin with seemingly enormous pride, me occasionally nodding and grinning in feigned approval.

If you were ‘in' with a hooligan then you were alright. I felt quite safe and was confident that I wouldn't leave his gaff with a broken nose and several fractured ribs. To be honest, I really didn't give a shit about the fighting tales, I was there for the warez.

During my first encounter, Walrus showed us both his Amiga 1000 and more pointedly Defender of the Crown. This simply blew me away, the graphics, the sound and the fact it was a game genre right up my street was breath-taking.

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He also had some music application with a virtual keyboard. Press a key and you would get ‘Dooooo’; another higher pitch key would create a higher pitched ‘Dooooo’.

In 1987 this was something special and I happily played with the ‘Dooooos’ for the best part of 30 minutes with a stupid grin on my face. Like the ST, it was early days for the Amiga but the early software completely sold it to me.

The Manchester crew did not seem interested in the Amiga, content with their ‘inferior’ machine. RobC took on a new handle of ‘WasNotWas’ a name he nicked from the Indie band and started cracking ST games, and so I ceased my visits to the city.

You needed to move on or get left behind in the ashes; that’s just how it was.

I simply had to get myself one of these all singing all dancing machines and that would prove a challenge. To cut costs, Commodore made buyers of the A500 model buy a separate A520 modulator.

This device allowed connectivity to a domestic TV. You needed one if you didn’t have a monitor, which at this point was me.

What they didn’t tell you was if you plugged in the modulator while the Amiga A500 was powered up, it fried the circuit board and blew up your Amiga.

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I heard many a story during the next few months of smoking Amiga circuit boards due to the ignorance of the local populace.

What made it worse is that the local computer store owner was taking a hard stance against this and refusing to exchange the masses of busted Amiga’s being returned to his store.

In 1987 there was no internet, and this was the most popular method of buying hardware. Suffice to say it did the store little favours and its reputation suffered.

Walrus’ place really was now the hub of the local pirate world and several visits to his pirate den quickly filled up my reformatted ST 3.5’ disks with Amiga warez of varying quality.

This ritual went on for the next two or three years, and netted me literally hundreds of ripped off disks and gained me a decent friend in Walrus.

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Despite his fearsome breath that could render a man unconscious for several hours I gained an uncanny ability to covertly hold my breath at exactly the correct moment without him noticing. Others were not so lucky.

My work status was changing as well as my choice of computers and all this piracy was starting to pay off in more ways than one.

To be continued...

All images have been cited and are under the category 'Labelled for Reuse'

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