Virus Warning on game disk label

[darthkur]

I recently acquired a small lot of ST disks. On the one's for Strider by U.S. Gold/Capcom there is printed "Virus Warning - power off computer before loading this software" I've tried looking up references to this both on here and all over the net but can not find the meaning of this admonition. Can anyone here explain exactly what that means? Thanks in advance.

[acharris]

Hi, probably this is a warning by US Gold/Capcom probably. They tell you that cause if there is a virus in the memory and the disk you enter is not write protected then the disk can become infected. By turning off the machine before loading the game will ensure that the RAM is cleared of any programs and you will have a clean boot to avoid any infection on the disc.

 

Probably someone will come along with a better explanation, but hope this helps.

 

Anthony

[darthkur]

That sounds logical. I still find it odd that there's no mention of this procedure anywhere. At the very least you would expect the warning to be on disks by other manufacturers as well.

[nyder]

Well, what it means is that there is some sort of boot virus on it that will infect any other boot media.

The person who wrote or typed the label probably put that on there so he wouldn't forget about it, and so that he could still play the game.

 

If it's like the Stoner virus (personally one of my favorites, I'll tell you why at the end of this post), then it would only transfer onto boot media's, actually floppy, because I don't think it infected my harddrive.

 

So the person had a ST without a harddrive and didn't want his strider game to infect anything else, so he labled it.

 

 

I personally find it pretty interesting. Have you booted the disk? If you do and have a harddrive, turn it off, unattach it or something. You could also make a bootable virus scanner and see if that will find anything on the strider disk.

 

If your not into it that much, then I'd be glad to take a look at it and see what's up.

 

 

okay, the reason why I like the Stoner virus was because it was not only my first virus, but at the time I was stoned (like always) and when I booted up my computer it said:"Your PC is Stoned!"

I laughed and said (outloud of course), "Damn Straight you are. Second Hand smoke gets you stoned also."

And of course, it took me about 3 infected disks before I figured it out.

 

But that's not why I like it, I like it because it's maker was a stoner, and only someone that was stoned would think of doing that. =)

[darthkur]

Thanks for the reply Nyder. Actually the disk, which is the first of two, is an original. The warning is printed on the part of the label that wraps around to the reverse side of the disk. It's only on the number 1 disk. The same space on the 2nd is blank.

I guess I could try to take a picture of it but being that my digital camera is of the extremely economical variety I'm not sure if the pic will come out good enough for the text to be legible.

[nyder]

So have you ran the game yet?

[darthkur]

No, I haven't tried any of the disks that I got in that auction at present. Sometimes it takes me a while to get around to things. Plus I wanted to see if I could find out anything about that warning on that disk first.

[nyder]

No, I haven't tried any of the disks that I got in that auction at present. Sometimes it takes me a while to get around to things. Plus I wanted to see if I could find out anything about that warning on that disk first.

 

 

yep, I know all about that. I have piles of stuff I have brought home and not gotten around to. =)

 

Well, if you figure it out, let us know, or if you can figure out how to make a copy of it, or a disk image of it, that would be cool to check out.

[tjlazer]

Ah yes back then most virus would save themselves on the bootblock of disks and spread that way, then reload themselves into memory when you loaded the disk later. But some commercial software would have custom bootloaders and if the virus saved itself on it the game would not load. This was the case for Amiga and Atari ST disks.. That is what the warning is about.

[+poobah]

Ah yes back then most virus would save themselves on the bootblock of disks and spread that way, then reload themselves into memory when you loaded the disk later. But some commercial software would have custom bootloaders and if the virus saved itself on it the game would not load. This was the case for Amiga and Atari ST disks.. That is what the warning is about.

 

Yup that's the reason.

 

You'd pop an infected disk in, boot up, virus gets loaded from boot sector of infected disk.

Everytime you insert a new disk, the virus writes itself to the new disk's boot sector from memory

 

Problems:

1) Infects more disks

2) If disk has a custom bootloader, the disk is wrecked and no longer boots

 

This was a bit of a support problem for software publishers, so the warning was added to some disks to try and prevent it.

[darthkur]

That's very interesting. I wasn't aware of the mechanics of virus proliferation during that time period. It sure has gotten a lot more complex these days. Shame that people still feel the need to create such things just to ruin other's property and cause chaos.