Perhaps I should look up the statute of limitations

But surely they can’t be more than forty years?

Anyway, when I was like fifteen, I cracked a bunch of Commodore 64 games. Games came on tapes, and they usually had some sort of turbo loader thing. Most of the turbo loaders were straightforward, but some were heavily obfuscated as a form of copy protection.

So my methodology would be to create “friendly” versions of these turbo loaders, and then use that to get the files off of the tapes and save them to diskettes. Then I just had to write a little loader, and then everything worked fine.

Not very complex cracking, but I was pretty good at it, so people brought me bags of tapes. I remember having a little hand held tape deck that I used to give the tapes a brief listen first — I could often identify which loader had been used by how the tapes sounded. BBZBTBSBBZZZ vs BZBZBBTTTTTSSSS.

And yesterday I re-discovered the C64 image files that a mate had transferred back in the 90s from the floppy diskettes, so I thought it’d be fun to see how many games cracked by me were included.

And it’s… 34? I don’t think this is a complete collection — if I remember correctly, a bunch of the floppies had degraded by the time he did the transfers, but whatevs. (And some of these were done with the help of other people, left anonymous in case forty years isn’t enough.)

Looking at the loading screens brings back memories — I remember that we were quite amused at the beefing that was going around in the C64 demo circles, with people insulting and challenging each other. So we came up with an imaginary beef between us and an imaginary other cracking team, and you can see traces of some of that on the loading screens below.

I suspect that we grew tired of this pretty soon… or perhaps the rest of the saga is just on those missing diskettes.

But I have to say that I had a surprisingly consistent design sense? Heh heh.