The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops – Part Three

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

'Cracking' - Software cracking is the modification of software to remove or disable features which are considered undesirable by the person cracking the software, especially copy protection features (including protection against the manipulation of software, serial number, hardware key, date checks and disc check) or software annoyances like nag screens and adware.

Several months later I found myself at RobC’s house. It was not my first visit, and how I got there I really don’t know as I didn’t possess a car in 1984. He lived with his parents in a huge rambling semi-detached property with a wildly overgrown garden.

I rapped on the front door only to have a young woman answer.

‘Just go up, second on right’. Was this his sister? She seemed quite normal.

I entered his bedroom and there he was there typing away, back turned but not oblivious to the fact that another was now present.

‘Alright’, I said.

A grunt came the response; he didn’t turn around.

I was used to this kind of behaviour from Rob. He couldn’t help being an unsociable bastard, but what he lacked in social graces he made up for it in raw programming talent.

I peered over his shoulder with interest. He was coding like the billies in hexadecimal. To my limited programming brain, this was nothing short of godly.

‘What are you coding?’, I mentioned casually.

‘It’s a menu maker’, he stated flatly.

Captured using the Atari Emulator (see end of post information)

I then got the full works of what he was up to. Not intent on cracking every Atari game on the planet he now wanted to create a menu utility application that used the Atari's display list interrupts. For the uneducated, this gave an impressive display (for 1984 standard) of rotating colours.

‘It’s going to be a musical menu maker too’, he told me quite proudly.

The music was to be stolen from commercial games and embedded into the menu maker. An impressive piece of coding and considering the evidence is still all over the internet, it surely made its mark in software ripoff history.

Turning around he made for the door and said, ‘C’mon I need to get some draw’.

We made our way to Moss Side and those horrendous 60's type flats that I mentioned and depicted in Part One. I do remember being in a car and that I was driving. Whose car it was I can't remember.

I can say I was not comfortable stopping in the middle of ‘gangland’ while Rob made his way into a large block of very dodgy looking flats for his ‘draw’.

My fears were to be unfounded as TEN minutes later he casually made his way back to the car and then subsequently back to his parents’ house to commence smoking.

I started smoking when I was 11 and stopped at 15. Yes, I know that’s fucked up but its fact. Over the years I have been offered smokes other than regular tobacco and have reluctantly tried them.

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If this stuff was regular Cannabis then I’m Jesus Christ.

Rob skinned up a couple of joints and passed one over to me. Several minutes later I was seeing double and shortly after severely throwing up in the family toilet.

I was never one for the smokey stuff and never seemed to accept that my body just wouldn’t tolerate it.

Rob seemed bemused at my discomfort but stopped short at outwardly laughing. It might have been worth it just to so see that ever so serious face contort into something resembling humour.

Sometime in late 1984, the unthinkable happened. A game had been supplied that Rob was having problems cracking. By this time, he had dibs in the local Maplin store on Oxford road and an independent software store in the centre of the city that specialised in American imports.

If either of those stores got a new game it was with Rob within a matter of hours, unwrapped and cracked in a short period of time. The employees got copies of the cracked merchandise as a reward. It was an amicable 'trading deal' that worked well for everyone.

Pete broke the devastating new to me. The local godfather of cracking had failed and we were all in a state of shock.

Captured using the Atari Emulator (see end of post information)

Alley Cat from Synapse software didn’t look anything special but that wasn’t the point. Defeat was not an option and simply could not happen.

We all waited tentatively hoping for a miracle and THREE Days later a haggard Rob emerged from his bedroom. Thin strands of straggly bum fluff hung from his chin and wafts of BO from his sodden unwashed armpits threatened to render anyone within fifty yards unconscious.

But what was that in his hand and that look in his eye? There was no mistaking the glint and after a mandatory shower, it was revealed that the beast had been tamed; the game had been cracked.

Captured using the Atari Emulator (see end of post information)

Alley Cat was a large game and used up half a disk co-habiting with another game I fail to remember the name of. It could be played and copied by anybody now and was placed on a special RobC Mega-Menu. We all sighed a big one and normality was resumed.

By mid-1985 Rob surprised me by stating he had got hold of a Commodore 64 from somewhere and was shifting his attention to this new baby.

By this time the ’64 was not anything new and had a reputation of having ‘better sound’ than the Atari due to the SID chip. I had not taken any interest so far but if ‘the supplier’ was heading that way then I surely would look too.

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Less than a week had passed and I had myself a second hand Commodore 64, cassette deck and 1541 disk drive. Cassette-based systems were still the mainstream and floppy disk drive’s considered extravagant, but essential to the hardened pirate.

I now had to learn a new operating system and acquiring this second-hand computer unknowingly opened a new set of contacts, forged the start of my eventual career path and placed me in touch with people I still now call friends.

To be continued...

All images have been cited and are under the catagory 'Labelled for Reuse'
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Atari images courtesy of the Atari Emulator
.atr files are now freely available for download and are no longer subject to copyright.