[HN Gopher] The masters of Commodore 64 games
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The masters of Commodore 64 games
Author : Retrogamingpap
Score : 81 points
Date : 2025-03-11 17:12 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (spillhistorie.no)
(TXT) w3m dump (spillhistorie.no)
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| LOAD"",8,1
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| PRESS PLAY ON TAPE
| jimt1234 wrote:
| At first I only had a tape drive. But I was later given a
| 1541 disk drive. I thought life couldn't get any better than
| a single floppy disk drive. LOL
| cheema33 wrote:
| Same same. After using tape for the longest time, 1541
| changed my life!
| bsdooby wrote:
| LOAD"*",8,1
| giamma wrote:
| SYS 64738
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Yeah!
| ryandrake wrote:
| The part about the "copy protection" schemes was sad/amusing. So
| much work put into cracking and anti-cracking, and even cracking
| for the purpose of legitimate distribution, and wasting memory on
| profanity-soaked rants to the hackers... Everyone involved in the
| story looks back at it as "fun" and "challenging" but all I see
| is wasted time on everyone's part and software that is more
| difficult to use. Here we are, 40 years later, and DRM is still
| with us and they're still hopelessly trying.
| classichasclass wrote:
| The C64 protection methods that drove me most up the wall were
| V-MAX! and Rapidlok, especially since V-MAX! existed in several
| different variations. Man, those were a pain. Harald Seeley
| (Alien Technology Group, who developed V-MAX! and WarpSpeed,
| and did a number of ports for companies like Cinemaware, was in
| my hometown of San Diego) eventually explained a lot of the
| tricks later on. Some good discussion here
| https://diskpreservation.rittwage.com/?pg=vmax and here
| https://diskpreservation.rittwage.com/dp.php?pg=rapidlok .
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| They "worked" in the sense that, when I managed to save up for
| a game on my minimum-wage salary, I bought a game that none of
| my friends had a cracked copy of. I remember buying EA's
| _Caveman Ughlympics_ for that reason (it also came with some
| cool extras in the box).
|
| But it didn't work in the sense of making me buy more games. I
| had hundreds of copied games and a couple dozen purchased ones,
| and if copy protection had been perfect, I would have had a
| couple dozen. The publishers always acted like I would have
| purchased the hundreds, which was impossible.
|
| So it was really a competition between the publishers to out-
| protect the others more than between the publishers and the
| customers.
| wiz21c wrote:
| especially in the time of 0-day warez. Interestingly, many
| thrived on the ShareWare business models (including John
| Carmack IIRC)
| ZeroMinx wrote:
| CRACKED BY MR Z...
| indigoabstract wrote:
| I suggest you read this page about the Dungeon Master ('87)
| copy protection which includes an interview with its main
| programmer and author of its (ingenious) copy protection.
|
| http://dmweb.free.fr/community/documentation/copy-protection...
|
| Nearly 40 years later, I still wouldn't call it "wasted time".
| hakaneskici wrote:
| I used to sell small business apps on floppy drives. For copy
| protection, one of the best tricks was to _physically_ damage a
| sector and try to format it.
|
| You take a floppy disk, use a pin to make a hole on the
| magnetic medium at a random place, then format the disk so that
| sector is marked as a "bad sector". You hardcode the sector ID
| in your app, then when your app runs, you try low-level
| formatting that sector. If it _can_ be formatted, it 's a
| pirate copy.
|
| Floppy disks had physical read-only mode, so my app asked users
| to put their disks in read-write mode to work :)
| rmb177 wrote:
| Spelunker, M.U.L.E, Seven Cities of Gold, Up N Down, Moon Patrol,
| Raid on Bungeling Bay, Blue Max
|
| I could go on and on...
| hotsauceror wrote:
| M.U.L.E., Bungeling Bay, Mission Impossible, Racing Destruction
| Set and Ultima IV were our go-tos.
| gramie wrote:
| I think you mean "Impossible Mission"!
| ipaddr wrote:
| Love the mission impossible voice
| jbperry wrote:
| Stay a while, Stay forever!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1_fDwX1VVY
| fodi wrote:
| For anyone else feeling a good hit of nostalgia, I highly
| recommend this excellent site with C64 games playable in the
| browser - and with netplay too! https://c64.krissz.hu/online-
| playable-games/
| ecairns wrote:
| Thank you for this. I'm going to play some M.U.L.E. tonight
| after work.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| I often wonder about nostalgia related to computers/computing.
| It's strange because, even though I spent countless hours on my
| Commodore 64 as a teenager, and it had a major influence on my
| life (it basically introduced me to programming and set the
| course for my professional life), I just don't feel the
| nostalgia vibes.
|
| I got my hands on an old C64 a few years ago and fired it up. I
| tinkered with it for about 10 minutes and lost interest. It
| just felt lame, a complete waste of time. It was surprising to
| me, considering how important the C64 has been in my life.
| Also, I feel that way about pretty much all old
| computer/computing devices. I've got an old laptops, iPods,
| iPhones, and even the original Rio PMP300 mp3 player, but I
| don't really feel any real nostalgia or love for them. It's
| like they were just tools I used, like a hammer or screwdriver,
| and that's it.
|
| Contrast that with my love of older cars. I love finding old
| cars on Craigslist, taking them home and tinkering with them,
| restoring them. It makes me feel like I'm cool, driving a
| mid-80s Honda CRX or something similar. I have no idea why that
| is; I was never a "car guy" until I got older. But, like I
| said, I often wonder why I have nostalgia vibes for one old
| thing (cars), but not another (computers), especially when one
| has had a much greater impact on my life.
|
| I wonder if it's society - that is, American culture has always
| had a major boner for cars and I'm being influenced by that.
| Or, maybe it's because "computers" have been my profession for
| the last 30 years, and that has killed my love for them. Not
| sure.
|
| BTW, no disrespect to those who do get nostalgia vibes for the
| C64 an other older devices. Just the opposite - much respect.
| rightbyte wrote:
| For some reason I share that view. Maybe it is since
| computers got so much better?
|
| I got way more nostalgia for NES, which I still think is fun
| to play and play with my kids. Super Mario still feels good
| while C64 games feel clunky.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| I've noticed with "retro"-looking games like Stardew
| Valley, people will say they look like 80s games. No, they
| look like 90s games (at worst). People forget how primitive
| the graphics were at 320x200x16. They were great at the
| time, and people did some ingenious stuff to get the most
| out of those systems, but they couldn't display anything
| like what's called retro today.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Ye it is a strange genre. Stardew Valley seems to have
| way better graphics than say Jack Jazz Rabbit and Red
| Alert.
|
| Also many retro looking games adds pixel effects that
| weren't there on crt:s. Games of that era were quite
| smooth looking.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Same thing with me. I grew up with an Apple // and was
| absolutely obsessed with it. Bought one during covid and was
| bored with it immediately. Not the same with my NES though.
| Idk why. Too primitive I guess.
| nurettin wrote:
| No problem, probably your expectations changed to the point
| your childhood computer is no longer interesting. As a child
| you were expecting discovery and wonder, and probably
| receiving it consistently. And that sense of wonder and
| discovery continues with cars.
| dep_b wrote:
| The great thing about old cars is that you can fix them up
| pretty much yourself, while a modern car has all kinds of
| software driven behaviour that is really hard to touch as a
| non-professional mechanic.
|
| A Commodore 64 or PDP-11 is the equivalent of that. There's
| 64Kb of RAM and I can understand every byte that is there,
| what it does, and how it ties into the hardware. When I look
| at most C64 games, I understand exactly how it's made. I can
| also do the same things myself.
|
| You might have the full Linux kernel code, but do you really
| understand completely how it works?
| II2II wrote:
| > I got my hands on an old C64 a few years ago and fired it
| up. I tinkered with it for about 10 minutes and lost
| interest. It just felt lame, a complete waste of time. (...)
| Contrast that with my love of older cars. I love finding old
| cars on Craigslist, taking them home and tinkering with them,
| restoring them.
|
| Perhaps the reason has to do with your approach. You're not
| going to have a chance to get hooked on the C=64 if your
| interest is in tinkering and restoring. That's barely enough
| time to load up a piece of software and refamiliarize
| yourself with it, never mind experience it in a new way. In
| contrast to your cars, it sounds like you spent enough time
| with them that you were experiencing them in a new way.
|
| My apologies if that sounds a bit harsh. In some ways I am
| similar. Even though I am fascinated by old technology, I
| never could get into old computers the way most people seem
| to get into them (e.g. by playing games from their
| childhood).
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I just don 't feel the nostalgia vibes._
|
| I half agree with you.
|
| I don't feel nostalgia when i see yet another emulator. I've
| tried all of them.
|
| But when i get a chance to put my hands on the real thing, it
| all comes flooding back.
| dylan604 wrote:
| i only tried playing one game, but the CRT effect was
| interesting. There's a bit of bending from a very round screen.
| The noise effect was also something that wasn't what I was
| expecting. At least they didn't try to over do it with scan
| lines
| bsenftner wrote:
| Wow. First time I've seen one of my old games in decades. Miner
| 2049'er sure looks like a game of the same name I wrote back in
| '82, age 17. Sold quite a few copies thru Sears & KMart in the
| US, distributors in UK sold a bunch more. Paid for a bunch of
| mid-80's parties.
| dole wrote:
| Miner 2049'er was up there with Hard Hat Mack and Donkey
| Kong. Maddening but great in that the stages had completely
| different mechanics, Miner was unforgiving in some ways but
| loose in others, felt like a precursor to Montezuma's
| Revenge. Thanks for the fun!
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Always was impressed by games developers who became
| millionaires back then.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Clarification siince the author does not mention this
| specifically: Disk drives dominated the C64 storage market in the
| US, Canada, and Germany, while cassette dominated the UK and
| elsewhere. Thus, US Gold had to convert US disk games to cassette
| for the UK market; I presume that the rushed jobs the article
| mentions were for especially popular games, or when there was an
| unusually short contractual deadline for delivery. Given how slow
| the native Commodore disk drive is, one can imagine how much more
| painful loading a designed-for-disk game from cassette. Games
| were often abridged to fit.
|
| That said, this meant that slow disk transfer was not a handicap
| for C64 in the UK. Since tape was the medium of choice for ZX
| Spectrum and other rivals, C64 was on a level playing field. If
| anything C64 still had the advantage, because the Commodore
| Datasette is a digital format and very reliable, while Spectrum
| and US rivals like Apple and TRS-80 use analog formats and are
| incredibly unreliable that made people cry, groan, moan, and
| curse. Apple II's tape storage is also analog, but Disk II caused
| the Apple market to very soon move to disk-only (and Disk II is
| perhaps the greatest of Woz's many late-1970s engineering
| triumphs) so it didn't matter.
|
| Three things I am unclear on:
|
| * The extent of the above-mentioned abridgement process. My
| understanding is that both cosmetic things like loading screens,
| and sometimes entire portions like (say) a couple of the sports
| in the Epyx _Games_ series, were removed. I don 't know if there
| is a compendium of the abridgements; I don't see the information
| at Lemon64, but perhaps I missed it.
|
| * Why software crackers had to crack cassette games in the first
| place, given that they can be duplicated with any dual-bay tape
| deck. Was there a reason other than to say they could do it (see
| next point), and perhaps to allow for cheating?
|
| * The extent of crack intros for cassette games. In the US,
| crackers (then and now) put small animations before loading to
| announce themselves send greetings to friends and rivals. I'm
| sure this happened in the UK but the medium no doubt restricted
| the intros' size.
| Jolter wrote:
| I think cracking had at least two reasons.
|
| 1. There was a lot of exotic copy protection going on,
| especially on disk. Putting data in sectors that could not be
| written by the standard disk copying methods was just the
| beginning. I don't know if any copy protection of tapes was
| ever effective but I wouldn't be surprised.
|
| 2. To enable the use of "turbo" loaders. Cassette games were
| released on standard cassettes that were maybe shorter than
| normal. But if you compressed the games using better
| algorithms, you could fit up to 20 games on one side of a
| standard audio cassette. Normally the turbo loader was placed
| first on the cassette. It would maybe take a minute or two to
| load. Then, the rest of the pirated games followed. You'd write
| down the index number of each game on the cassette cover so you
| could fast-forward to it. The reason this was called "turbo"
| was presumably because as the game took up less space on the
| tape, you didn't have to wait as long for it to roll past the
| read head. The c64 could decompress the data faster than the
| Datasette could play it back, so there was no processing wait.
| Most likely even a game that could be copied straight over to
| another cassette, still had copy protection that prevented it
| from loading using a different loader than it was mastered for.
| Hence it needed to be cracked.
| jimsmart wrote:
| > The c64 could decompress the data faster than the Datasette
| could play it back, so there was no processing wait.
|
| C64 fast loaders generally didn't use any compression
| whatsoever.
|
| They would cut the load time in half by simply only
| writing/reading the file once (whereas normally the load
| process actually read the data twice) - and then get extra a
| whole heap of extra speed on top of that (turbo speed!), by
| implementing the load in custom code, basically working at a
| faster baud rate than the standard C64 kernel code did.
| jimsmart wrote:
| > Since tape was the medium of choice for ZX Spectrum and other
| rivals, C64 was on a level playing field.
|
| Kinda. While the C64 had its own cassette player - the C64 was
| very slow to load stuff compared to the others, until fast load
| came along.
|
| Part of the reason behind this was that by default the C64
| actually loaded the data twice during the process of loading
| from tape -- once to actually read the data, then it read a
| second copy to verify the data.
|
| > Why software crackers had to crack cassette games in the
| first place, given that they can be duplicated with any dual-
| bay tape deck.
|
| It was actually quite rare to duplicate games with twin-tape
| systems -- at least amongst all the folk I knew. It was easier
| to load a cracked game into memory, using some fast loader (or
| indeed: from disk), then write it out again.
|
| > The extent of crack intros for cassette games.
|
| I recall that lot of cracked games showed an intro once loaded
| - the intro was often added onto the game, and often the tape
| and disk versions did this the same way (as opposed to a
| separately loaded program). This was part of the reason why
| folk were trying to write such small intros.
| finchisko wrote:
| Oh this bring back memories. As during communist era, there were
| no extra money or even stores where to buy. So we copied
| casettes. First load game then save on blank cassete. This worked
| for almost all games, but one. That one instead of waiting for
| run or save command, started game immediately. So only way to
| copy was using double decker. But most of double deckers were
| shitty. Adding so much noise, that copy didn't work. I remember
| visiting one friend that has high quality deck, that was able to
| make a workable copy.
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