Some questions about the 'homesoft' menu disks

[carmel_andrews]

How many of the homesoft menu disks were in original A8 format before they went over to emulator format

 

How many of the games were hacked/cracked by homesoft themselves/himself or were they all cracked by homesoft (since some games don't come with the homesoft 'cracked' screen)

 

How many versions of homesofts 'cracked' screen was there

 

I noticed that they managed to hack USG's gauntlet, Vanadium and some other games that load in levle or extra data after the main game (as data files) I have'nt seen another dos menu sys. that does that (though that scheme was popular with british boot menu programs like john williams multiboot, multiboot, rob c and variants, ian k/c-elton and howfen dos)

[+CharlieChaplin]

Well,

 

I would say that all "older menu" games that contain the Homesoft intro (or cracked screen as you name it) were really cracked by Homesoft. The somewhat "newer menu" games do not contain the Homesoft intro anymore, instead they contain one data-file ranging from $2020-203A and if you look at this file, it contains some text which says "file-version by Homesoft", so you can be sure these programs were also either cracked or patched / converted / whatever into a single-load/single-file version by Homesoft. However, if a game does not contain the Homesoft intro nor the data-file with the text "file-version by Homesoft" then it was most likely not cracked, patched, converted by Homesoft, he just put it on his menu disks and into his collection of A8 games...

 

Example: Force of Four was/is a PD/Freeware/Shareware program without any copy-protection, so there was no need to crack it. But the original version consisted of two or more files, whereas the Homesoft version is a single-file (the same is true for Mazezam, Asteroids Emulator, all those TB XL and CTB games by KE-Soft/Kemal Ezcan and many many more programs). Homesoft patched also a lot of those slow "please wait initializing" Atari Basic games and created fast loading ML files of them (some of them do still require Basic, some do not).

 

-Andreas Koch.

Edited October 31, 2012 by CharlieChaplin