Stormtrooper of Death Posted December 11, 2016 Share Posted December 11, 2016 N.A.P.O. was short for? https://demozoo.org/groups/50445/ North Atlantic Pirate Organisation ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lotek_style Posted December 11, 2016 Share Posted December 11, 2016 Is that 'wild' guessing or can it be 100% confirmed from some source? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stormtrooper of Death Posted December 11, 2016 Share Posted December 11, 2016 Is that 'wild' guessing or can it be 100% confirmed from some source? I remember something like that, but it could be that I am wrong, as i cannot quote a source. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mclaneinc Posted December 12, 2016 Share Posted December 12, 2016 There was a possible member on here quite a few years ago and I've messaged them just in case....Don't hold your breath. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
devwebcl Posted December 12, 2016 Share Posted December 12, 2016 Usually it was a XOR with a constant or a counter, being 255 ($FF) the most used constant other than zero (no XOR). For constants, I developed an utility to search for a 3 characters substring from the credits that were displayed and allowed to edit that directly from the disk. It was called "BUSCADOR" and was written in Atari BASIC and then "compiled" with MMG BASIC Compiler. . The XEX is downloadable from my site: http://www.vitoco.cl/buscador/buscador.xex which game has XOR encryption ? (related to text changer). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ryanmercer Posted December 12, 2016 Share Posted December 12, 2016 Atari specific? No clue, I was born in 85. In general, John Draper. I've been interacting with Captain Crunch for 6 or 7 years now and, despite his health issues, he's still an awesome dude (although sometimes I wonder if anyone is home or if the lights are just on). When Hackers came out in 1995 we already had a Windows 95 machine at home and had been using 3.11 at my friend's house for a year or so before that. We were all over http BBS and MUDs but Hackers introduced a few 10 year old kids to an entirely different world of computers. We began scouring the internet with Infoseek and AltaVista and began finding all sorts of hacker-cracker-phreaker related stuff from the 80's and early 90's and began to devour everything and experiment any way we could. We may or may not have found ways to still exploit some payphones and may or may not have been social engineering a good number of people largely through digital communication. Captain Crunch and Jolly Roger were these mythical figures that we'd hear of time and time again and looked up to. We also discovered folks like Abbie Hoffman and Frank Abagnale Jr and would use anything we could gleam from their histories, or those that followed in their footsteps, to benefit ourselves. Hypothetically. These days I'm most like "eh, is there an app for that or some service I can pay for" and "where's my credit card so I can pay for this service so I can watch Monty Python because I can't be asked to get up and go to my computer and pirate the stuff". Hell I don't even jailbreak or root my phones anymore, it always ends up being a hassle down the line for some sort of functionality and I just want my devices to work more oft than not haha. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vitoco Posted December 13, 2016 Share Posted December 13, 2016 which game has XOR encryption ? (related to text changer). As I couldn't recall, I had to pick up my orange copybook and seek through my old notes. This is what I've found: - Most of the times, the XOR "encryption" was mainly included by pirates/crackers to protect their modified version, not by game developers. - Probably none or few ROM games used XOR to hide messages to be displayed on screen, as that could be directly hardcoded with their respective display lists. - XOR encryption could also be found in boot loaders to "protect" the whole game that is being loaded as binary data, not just in text messages contained in the original XEX. Some of them used constants in the XOR operator, some used a counter as operand and some used "random" data as a pattern to decode disk sectors just after read. I'm not sure for any of the following titles if it had a XOR protection added by a cracker or it was an original one, but some games I've found so far in my notes are: Laser Gates Pathfinder Ghost Chaser Karateka Beach Head Lode Runner's Rescue Gremlins 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fujidude Posted December 14, 2016 Share Posted December 14, 2016 My favorite cracker from BITD? I loved them all! Hehe. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+rdemming Posted December 14, 2016 Share Posted December 14, 2016 - XOR encryption could also be found in boot loaders to "protect" the whole game that is being loaded as binary data, not just in text messages contained in the original XEX. Some of them used constants in the XOR operator, some used a counter as operand and some used "random" data as a pattern to decode disk sectors just after read. One example is International Karate that used XOR encoding for the "disk copy protection" code. I believe it used a counter for the XOR value but my memory is vague about that. Robert Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteveZipp Posted February 4, 2017 Share Posted February 4, 2017 North Atlantic Pirate Organisation ? Is that 'wild' guessing or can it be 100% confirmed from some source? No. North Atlantic Pirate Organisation is correct. I remember that Kilroy was member of NAPO. Cool cracks. Funny, he calculated the memory start address of the game to load after his intro using the checksum of his own intro-text. Changing his intro text would obviously crash the game. The HTT Big demo used Xor or Eor-ing the system font for encrypting the text: LDA text XOR/EOR sysfont STA screen 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
erichenneke Posted February 5, 2017 Share Posted February 5, 2017 I remember one that was "from the spittoon of the Phlegm hacker". Hard to forget that one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mclaneinc Posted February 5, 2017 Share Posted February 5, 2017 Original, I'll give it that... Sort of a miss placed creativity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lotek_style Posted February 5, 2017 Share Posted February 5, 2017 No. North Atlantic Pirate Organisation is correct. I remember that Kilroy was member of NAPO. Cool cracks. Funny, he calculated the memory start address of the game to load after his intro using the checksum of his own intro-text. Changing his intro text would obviously crash the game. The HTT Big demo used Xor or Eor-ing the system font for encrypting the text: LDA text XOR/EOR sysfont STA screen Hey Steve Well I thought It might also be "North Amercian" instead of Atlantic? Did you find any of their releases where it states 'Atlantic' ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteveZipp Posted February 5, 2017 Share Posted February 5, 2017 (edited) Hey Steve Well I thought It might also be "North Amercian" instead of Atlantic? Did you find any of their releases where it states 'Atlantic' ? Imho, it's like NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organization, so in this case: North Atlantic Pirate Organization. That's what I can recall. Needs some google- or youtubing to confirm Edited February 5, 2017 by SteveZipp Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lotek_style Posted February 5, 2017 Share Posted February 5, 2017 It's like NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organization, so in this case: North Atlantic Pirate Organization. That's what I can recall. Needs some google- or youtubing to confirm Well google did not give any results and I have checked all of their cracks I could find... nothing gave any clue that's why I was asking here. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteveZipp Posted February 5, 2017 Share Posted February 5, 2017 Well google did not give any results and I have checked all of their cracks I could find... nothing gave any clue that's why I was asking here. Would be great if the iconic Kilroy could give us an affirmative answer ... Is he around ? Anyone ? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted February 5, 2017 Share Posted February 5, 2017 Would be great if the iconic Kilroy could give us an affirmative answer ... Is he around ? Anyone ? You can read "Kilroy was here" all around the world, so it looks like he is everywhere - he was even on a Styx album... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fujidude Posted February 6, 2017 Share Posted February 6, 2017 You can read "Kilroy was here" all around the world, so it looks like he is everywhere - he was even on a Styx album... Yep. The Styx album which began the death of the band. They should have just named the album "Dennis De Young's Ego." It would have been more applicable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stormtrooper of Death Posted February 12, 2017 Share Posted February 12, 2017 No. North Atlantic Pirate Organisation is correct. I remember that Kilroy was member of NAPO. Cool cracks. Funny, he calculated the memory start address of the game to load after his intro using the checksum of his own intro-text. Changing his intro text would obviously crash the game. The HTT Big demo used Xor or Eor-ing the system font for encrypting the text: LDA text XOR/EOR sysfont STA screen I had to crack the Big Demo because it didnt run on my Atari 600XL with 1064 memory expansion. Because my 600XL had a difrent ROm the decoding of the Big Demo ended in gargabe. Anhow, my 600XL version didnt work on standard atari's either , after i had my own Big Demo version. hehe. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gunstar Posted February 13, 2017 Share Posted February 13, 2017 (edited) I never knew about or obtained any cracked software until the early 90's when I answered an ad for "PD" in the back of one of the last Atari magazines. It was a guy in New York City by the name of Sid Meyer(s) (the sim-city programmer?). I got a catalog from him with 100's of commercial titles on it, most from England and Europe that I'd never heard of as they were never commercially released in the states. An entirely new world of software opened up to me. I ordered tons of disks from him, though at the time, only about half of the games would work right, being PAL and me with an NTSC. In any case, I never had a "favorite" hacker/cracker and until that time I didn't own a single pirated bit of software. Not that I was a goody-two-shoes back in the 80's, if I couldn't afford to buy a new game, I just shop-lifted it. Luckily that was just adolescents and I grew out of it decades ago, and am no longer a thief. Even if I had known about cracked software at the time, I always preferred the real thing with real boxes/manuals/etc., so I would have just used the old five-finger-discount at the local software shop anyway. Even today, though I've downloaded everything Atari 8-bit under the sun, for games I like, I still try and obtain the originals off eBay, etc. And even home-brew releases that are free to download, I will purchase professionally packaged versions if made available. I really don't like the cracker menus and intros as all. If I want to see stuff like that, I'll load up a demo. That all being said, I do use cracks by Mr. Bacardi and Glenn the 5200 man a lot, at least until I track down the original complete games. Edited February 13, 2017 by Gunstar Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MEtalGuy66 Posted February 13, 2017 Share Posted February 13, 2017 What the hell happened to Carmel? It says he was last active on October 16, 2013?!?! Did he die or something? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
miker Posted February 13, 2017 Share Posted February 13, 2017 I had to crack the Big Demo because it didnt run on my Atari 600XL with 1064 memory expansion. Because my 600XL had a difrent ROm the decoding of the Big Demo ended in gargabe. Anhow, my 600XL version didnt work on standard atari's either , after i had my own Big Demo version. hehe. It even hasn't run properly my my XEGS with its original ROM. Back in tha day I wondered what was broken - my comp or the demo. At the same time it ran on 800XE of my friend... Now I know, hehe. Anyway decoding using ROM was somehow stupid. .P 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mclaneinc Posted February 13, 2017 Share Posted February 13, 2017 (edited) What the hell happened to Carmel? It says he was last active on October 16, 2013?!?! Did he die or something? Dunno, he just vanished...Always known for saying odd stuff.. I remember on a thread where I was talking about Noel Daniel, him of Thunderfox and Sidewinder by Futureware, well Carmel chimed in and said he was Noel's partner ie in a gay way......Twaddle?, I don't know, he did as I did know Noel and frequented Silica in Tottenham court road. I knew Noel and Futureware from reviewing their game Sidewinder for Atari User (nice guys as well) Hope he's ok but was prone to making completely false statements... Edited February 13, 2017 by Mclaneinc 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bryan Posted February 13, 2017 Share Posted February 13, 2017 Well google did not give any results and I have checked all of their cracks I could find... nothing gave any clue that's why I was asking here. I remember seeing at least one loader screen that had it spelled out, so proof is out there. I can't say 100% that it was North Atlantic Pirate Org, though. Dunno, he just vanished...Always known for saying odd stuff.. Most annoying was when he'd come into page 12 of a discussion and post something irrelevant and off the cuff without reading any of the thread. Seemed like he might have some kind of disorder. I also often wondered if he was a 2nd account of someone else here. I do hope he's okay, though. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mclaneinc Posted February 14, 2017 Share Posted February 14, 2017 (edited) Who knows, apart from the weird and untrue 'facts' he posted he was ok, I have to thank him for pointing me to Altirra's first public release and we would joke about him being from central London and me being from the outer regions of London as a 'class divide' but he seemed to have some issues, as a person who suffers from severe depression and stress related mental health issues part of me feels sorry for him but no one was putting a gun to his head to make him posts those weird almost attention seeking lies about things? He just brushed people the wrong way at times and took stick for it.. Edited February 14, 2017 by Mclaneinc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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