The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Four

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

@steevc mentioned 'computer clubs' in his recent spinoff article of this series. Like him I found these clubs to be ripoff clubs and little else.

The term ‘ripoff club’ essentially means nothing much happened besides everyone copying each others games. It was at one such club in the town of Burnley, Lancashire where I met a fellow Atari enthusiast who will remain nameless.

By summer 1985 I had an Atari 800 and a Commodore 64 sitting side by side, the former with dual floppy drives and the later with a single. I couldn’t focus my attention on both and one was going to have to go.

The Atari went at some stage during late 1985 and I now needed to find some Commodore 64 contacts to build my almost non-existent ripoff collection.

The aforementioned Atari enthusiast from the computer club put me in touch with a bloke who lived close by in nearby Brierfield who went by the name of ‘Blackbeard’. At least he went by that name in later years. There will be no real names mentioned to protect the guilty.

Blackbeard had a strange looking eye. He told me that it had been earned by walking into a protruding tree branch while walking home pissed one night.

It didn’t give him the intimating glare of John Lydon and an eyepatch was not necessary, though the character of Long John Silver may have been very appropriate.

You couldn’t but help like Blackbeard. He was a skinny gaunt bloke with lank hair, always full of beans and sported a lopsided grin.

He also had a shitload of Commodore 64 ripped off games, and I mean six or seven large disk boxes.

One thing I need to make clear is the Pirate’s Code of Conduct. This was an unwritten agreement that any decent pirate confirmed to.

Thou will not charge thou fellow Pirate any amount of money to copy games, ever

I came across some unscrupulous bastards in my time that tried to sell me warez but I never once parted with money EVER. These kinds of people were outcasts, scum and filth. We were not in it to gain money, it was never about that.

Blackbeard certainly did not come into the category, if anything he was too trusting. After showing me the amazing ‘Mighty Bogg’ demos that showed off the SID chip in all its glory with songs such as Depeche Mode’s, ‘Shake the Disease’ and Harold Faltermeyer’s ‘Axel F’ it was down to business.

The Mighty Bogg is still about and commented on a forum, though the post is 11 years old now.

‘Just borrow a boxful and bring them back when you have ripped em’ all off’, he would say with a glint in his eye.

‘A boxful’ was around 100 disks or so. Not a five-minute job by any means. The 5.25’ disks had been double cut too meaning both sides had games included.

Blackbeard revealed to me that he had some knowledge of cracking games, and was willing to teach me some tricks. I was instructed to buy a copy of the ‘Commodore 64 Programmers Reference Guide’ and pick up Epyx Fastload, Isepic and another disassembler cartridge that held itself outside the usual Commodore memory locations.

The book I had to buy, but the cartridges were also rip-offs and could be obtained by Blackbeard himself via his many dodgy contacts. Nothing was safe from being ripped off, and hardware was no exception.

All were in my hands in a short period of time and true to his word Blackbeard would lend me copies of cassette games and task me with ripping them off to disk.

He explained things such as where the screen data was held, in one of several places and sneaky protection code that could hide in the keyboard buffer.

I was getting to the stage where the challenge of converting cassette based games to run off disk was more enjoyable than playing the games. I had this thing about always capturing the loading screen, and then displaying it while the main part of the game loaded.

A cartridge like the IsePic would simply freeze the game and dump the memory out. It was like taping a song from the radio, you might miss the first few seconds of the song. To me it was untidy, and I wanted to do it properly.

I got quite competent at doing this but never thought myself to be a true cracker in the same league of RobC. Using hardware tools and a little knowledge was a far cry from typing in Hexadecimal at top speed and ‘real cracking’.

After exhausting Blackbeard’s collection of cassette’s, I started buying, yes you heard correctly! Masterstronic games which were around £1.99 each from the local Boots store, just to crack.

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One of these was Flash Gordon, a multi-part cassette loading game. It had a loading screen which I quickly extracted and got to work on the first part. It was easy enough, but then I had to get the other parts out.

I found the tape loading routine (Yes, I could read some 6502 assembler) and substituted it for a disk loading routine. Where I got it from I don’t know. I then had to play this goddamn awful game to get to the end of part one to see if part two loaded from disk and not tape.

After hours of trying and dying, I managed to compete the first part. I was rewarded with the 1541 powering up and the second part loading and starting. I was ecstatic, I had done it and first time!!

Talk about a misspent youth!

To be continued...

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