First Hack?

[ClausB]

What was your first Atari 8-bit hack of someone else's program?

 

Mine was "Good Buddy Invaders" in 1981. I modified the marching alien characters in Atari's Space Invaders (cassette version) to show the names of my house-mates (the Good Buddies). The names ranged from 3 to 5 letters and I squeezed them into 13 pixels wide (hmmm, was this the inspiration for ACE-80?). No room for spaces between each character in CLAUS or CRAIG but one blank pixel jumped around between the letters as they marched. And the letters individually bobbed up and down too, so it was barely legible. I'll post it if anyone cares.

[Rybags]

Can't really remember the "first".

 

An early one was probably Shamus. Removed some code that checked for disk drive, and made it XL compatible.

 

Cracked a few games.

 

I started on a "Snapshot" type system for the XL that used a RAM based modified OS and let you just dump out RAM at the press of a key.

I was going to make it all nice and user-friendly, but only got it to the stage where it worked. Used it to get a number of games from full disk into files.

 

Did a few patches for extra lives, etc on some games.

 

Did another program that made a RAM-based OS and allowed you to turn collision detection off.

 

Red Max - I remember the last level had this seemingly impossible part that you'd always collide with, so I made a program that went let you view the levels onscreen. From there I was able to work out which byte needed patching, and removed the offending object.

 

Modified a few games way back and recently to make them XL compatible.

 

Removed self-destruct code from numerous cartridge games. For some reason the Thorn-EMI ones were near impossible to crack, not sure if I ever got one of theirs going.

Edited April 25, 2008 by Rybags

[atarixle]

I think, mine was the BASIC-Version of Dash (Boulder Dash Clone published by the german magazine "Happy Computer") ... I added some functions to get to the next level and to have unfinished time.

[UNIXcoffee928]

Modified a FORTRAN program running on a Honeywell mainframe, accessed at 300 bps via Telenet to display 40 column output for a program that generated accurate statistics from years, months, weeks, days, hours... down to the amount of seconds for any given range of dates.

 

Allegedly, of course.

 

It was amusing to have an idea of how many minutes +/- foo that you've been alive... great fun when you're 13, and people ask you how old you are...

 

Allegedly, of course.

 

 

= )

 

 

Nowadays, however, I usually state my age in base 16....

 

= )

Edited April 27, 2008 by UNIXcoffee928

[+bf2k+]

Not a hack... a crack. Pinball Construction Set. It was the only one I ever did.

[WizWor]

When I bought my first load of cassette games, I purchased the educator bundle. I remember thumbing through the BASIC book (by Linda something) while Energy Czar was running and learning how to 'reset' a BASIC program. Once I hit the reset key and typed list [Return] into my computer, I was on my way. Within a few hours, I had customized most of the strings in the program. I left the program running until I could get to the local department store to purchase a tape to save the 'hack' to. By the time I went to bed, I had backups of all my cassette programs -- although Zaxxon would not load properly from my backup.

 

Lots of fun.

[potatohead]

First good Atari one was editing the Ultima II maps to permit easier entry to things.

 

Lots of Apple ][ hacks and cracks before that.

[iratanam]

I remember working for hours, but finally removing the copy protection from Data East's Zorro and Mr. Do!

[Beetle]

My friend Roemer and i modified Chaos Music Composer so it uses Stereo Pokey where available. That was my first hack (not his first, though).

[carmel_andrews]

What was your first 'hardware' hack, eh. beetle

[Shamus]

I don't remember the first, but removing disk based so-called 'copy protection' was a hobby of mine (ah, youth, when one had little money and loooooots of time ). I think my favorite was my crack for Wayout. It seems that there was some fancy checksumming hidden deep in the code and of course I didn't have any Omnimon or anything that would have made tracing that kind of thing child's play. So I hit upon the idea of cloning sector 1, putting it on the disk (I think in sector 720) and writing my replacement for sector 1 in such a way that it would load the "real" sector 1 over my code and continue execution just past the bad sector check. The hidden checksum routine was none the wiser.

 

Come to think of it, I do remember my first hack. My first hack was converting the Apple game "Sabotage" to the Atari. /me checks Atarimania... Hm, it isn't there.

[Nukey Shay]

First hack ever would probably be of Strip Poker for the AppleII. I used to replace the bitmaps (just plain ol' binary saves of the hires screen) to drawings of my own that resembled...um...girls that I knew using a (MECC?) sketch program in study hall very discreetly.

 

First hack on the A8 would be one of the many programs I'd typed in. Could be a hack of Myrtle The Turtle (Whacko Guide To Programming Your Own Arcade Games) to include more levels.

 

First hack on the A8 of a commercial game would be of Star Raiders, I wanted to know what rank an unattainable score would give you by patching over the time, energy, damage, and hyperspace drift adjustments.

[MrFish]

First hack on the A8 of a commercial game would be of Star Raiders, I wanted to know what rank an unattainable score would give you by patching over the time, energy, damage, and hyperspace drift adjustments.

 

what were the results of your experiment, sir?

[Nukey Shay]

That having an unattainable score makes no difference. You just get the top rank (Star Commander - Class 1).

 

Patch listing for the 400/800 cart:

 

B0D7> A9 00

A8D7> A9 00

AB5F> A9 00 ... deactivate hyperspace drift

 

AEE5> A2 00 ... deactivate damage taken (you still die if you get hit w/shields off)

 

B54E> EA EA EA ... deactivate timer

 

B873> EA EA EA ... deactivate fuel consumption

[Beetle]

What was your first 'hardware' hack, eh. beetle

 

That was a memory upgrade which took my 64k 800XL to 192k, allowing to copy medium density disk in one stroke.

Rather boring today, but very exiting back then

[Rybags]

Nice. You should do a RAM-based "Trainer" version.

 

While you're at it, a PAL "red" fix would obviously be in order too.

 

Just two things I didn't like about Star Raiders:

 

The "purple alert".

Graphics 7 instead of 15 - although I believe SR was written to work on an 8K RAM system ?

[carmel_andrews]

Rybag's...DO you have an emulator format version of that program you said you did in your earlier posts

 

As for beetle...i think you mean a 128k upgrade (not 64k)...At least your competant with a soldering iron...You wouldn't catch me dead with one of those (mind you they make a good alternative to a 'light saber')...And i bet the xl was a 'bitch' to upgrade (but easier then the XE)

[Rybags]

Which one? The collision thing?

 

Possibly on floppy somewhere - no need for it really since the emulator lets you selectively disable collision detection anyway.

 

ed - seems I was right - Star Raiders only uses the first 8K RAM.

Edited May 1, 2008 by Rybags

[carmel_andrews]

Sorry Rybag's...I meant the one that converts whole disk proggies into files...Somewhat like CSS's 'The Impossible'

[Rybags]

That thing (I think I called it "Game Freezer" or something) was kinda "in development".

 

Wasn't really user-friendly or anything, and dumped straight to disk with no regard of what was already on there.

 

It's kind of irrelevant these days - you can just write out segments of RAM out to files with the emulator - plus it has the added advantage of being able to tell you the exact contents of the Antic GTIA registers.

 

I remember "The Impossible". Pretty funny that - all it did was take the cassette init vector over then do a disk boot. It relied on the program then not clearing the cassette boot flag, and being able to still run normally after a reset, not to mention not overwriting the actual "Impossible" program in RAM.

[carmel_andrews]

It (Impossible) also allowed you to 'copy' or back up somewhat heavy protected disks (a bit like having a happy/lazer but as software)...that least, that was the 'claim' that CSS made

 

I'm going to 'mess' about with a few ATR's later on...Just to see if what you say is true....Only prob. is, some of the polish stuff...Most of their games switch their code into hi-mem (over $bfff) or to stop people hacking their games...to putting the run/init address into hi-mem (which basically means you can't run/init the dumped proggie)

 

There was one way i remember how you could hack a game that loaded code over $Bfff, all you did was firstly dump from 0400h-Bfffh, then dump from C000h-Cfffh, D800-FFFF and making sure that when you entered the monitor (Omnimon etc) you didn't go through the reset routine, otherwise it will wirte back the old values into hi-mem (it worked on Zybex and a couple of others I tried)...Although now, i just look at the game loader (which is 'sometimes' helpfull

[ClausB]

What was your first Atari 8-bit hack of someone else's program?

 

Mine was "Good Buddy Invaders" in 1981. I modified the marching alien characters in Atari's Space Invaders (cassette version) to show the names of my house-mates (the Good Buddies). The names ranged from 3 to 5 letters and I squeezed them into 13 pixels wide (hmmm, was this the inspiration for ACE-80?). No room for spaces between each character in CLAUS or CRAIG but one blank pixel jumped around between the letters as they marched. And the letters individually bobbed up and down too, so it was barely legible. I'll post it if anyone cares.

I'll post it even if no one cares:

 

It's a bootable disk 8K ATR (zipped).

GBI.zip

[Fujix]

A crack... my all-time favourite software Flight Simulator II.

 

I searched for years for a crack. I had an original boxed copy bought for what was megabucks back in the day but almost 20 years later I wanted to make a backup, copy it to a hard drive and also run it from an XF551. All the existing copies until mine (even the one in the Holmes collection) blanked the screen after 40 seconds of flying. Mine can be played with no limits, copied to hard/card drive -- whatever!

 

Announced on comp.sys.atari.8bit on 30 December 2001 (ie waaaay too late to be of much interest!)

Edited May 5, 2008 by Fujix

[ClausB]

What was your first Atari 8-bit hack of someone else's program?

 

Mine was "Good Buddy Invaders" in 1981. I modified the marching alien characters in Atari's Space Invaders (cassette version) to show the names of my house-mates (the Good Buddies). The names ranged from 3 to 5 letters and I squeezed them into 13 pixels wide (hmmm, was this the inspiration for ACE-80?). No room for spaces between each character in CLAUS or CRAIG but one blank pixel jumped around between the letters as they marched. And the letters individually bobbed up and down too, so it was barely legible. I'll post it if anyone cares.

I'll post it even if no one cares:

 

It's a bootable disk 8K ATR (zipped).

Like any good father would, I just gave my kids their first hacking lesson. Here is their effort, a hack of my first hack. I did mine with graph paper, a mental binary-to-hex converter, and Atari Assembler/Editor. Being twenty-first century kids, they drew the characters in MS Paint, transferred the hex values using MS Debug, and tested on Atari++.

BI.zip

[snicklin]

I quite enjoyed that game... even if I do not know the original.

 

My first hack was Thorn Emi's 'Soccer' game. I put my name onto the advertisement boards along the sides. I was so impressed! All I'd done was change a few bytes!

Edited August 2, 2009 by snicklin