GAMERS LAIR

ausf

Ausf

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There were also magazines with code written in you could type out, dialup bulletin boards, pre-internet, and the most common of all, just physically copying things.

Anything publicly given away, like through radio or magazines, was likely just public domain trash no one wanted anyway.
 
whatnitrus

WhatNitrous

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ausf said:
There were also magazines with code written in you could type out, dialup bulletin boards, pre-internet, and the most common of all, just physically copying things.

Anything publicly given away, like through radio or magazines, was likely just public domain trash no one wanted anyway.
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And none of those are unfamiliar to me, but I never had a Commodore either 🤷‍♂️

I still remember when a BBS over procomm confused the hell out of me :LOL:
 
ivo-ivic

silent_passenger

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ausf said:
There were also magazines with code written in you could type out, dialup bulletin boards, pre-internet, and the most common of all, just physically copying things.

Anything publicly given away, like through radio or magazines, was likely just public domain trash no one wanted anyway.
Click to expand...
Not really. Digital copyright laws didn't exist, or at least they weren't clear, so pirating the games was normal. I recorded Dan Dare (C-64) from the national TV - educational show about computers. Cheats were also very popular - we called them "Pokes", because of the POKE BASIC command, and most game magazines had them. Back then, it was like in the Wild West, but with computers. 🤷‍♂️
 
ausf

Ausf

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ivo-ivic said:
Not really. Digital copyright laws didn't exist, or at least they weren't clear, so pirating the games was normal.
Click to expand...
Depends where you were. Some countries completely ignored things like that. Others were more cautious. I remember typing out Moonlander for C64. It took longer to type out than it took me to get bored of playing it. Waste of time, and not something I ever repeated.
 
whatnitrus

WhatNitrous

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ausf said:
Depends where you were. Some countries completely ignored things like that. Others were more cautious. I remember typing out Moonlander for C64. It took longer to type out than it took me to get bored of playing it. Waste of time, and not something I ever repeated.
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We didnt even have educational shows about computers here until Obama did some java kiddie block commercial that involved drag and drop code :ROFLMAO: (what a shameful moment)

If you were using a computer here before AOL you were already a PC elitist, if you were good at it you were in a class of your own and it was harder to find somebody you could trust enough to do things with to learn further...since the first thing you learned was to trust nobody :LOL:

I got kicked out of a military base poking around through telnet at about 13yrs old and that was the day I realized I wasnt some grandiose haxor...and redoubled my learning efforts.

Nothing will wake you up quite like someone disabling your call blocking internet and calling your house to tell you to stay the fuck out of the military base lmao.
 
ausf

Ausf

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The closest I came to being an elite hacker man was removing the copy protection from games. If you used a hex editor, and changed the value of the answers to FF, it meant the answer to all questions was nothing. So if you pressed enter without typing anything, that was the correct answer.
 
whatnitrus

WhatNitrous

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ausf said:
elite
Click to expand...
Hexor*
ausf said:
it meant the answer to all questions was nothing. So if you pressed enter without typing anything, that was the correct answer.
Click to expand...
This reminds me of a few of my sadder days...

When I first realized qbasic existed I tried typing in normal text as if telling it the story I wanted it to produce and expected it would make a game for me :ROFLMAO:

I still wish I had my old wolfenstein edit where I used other programs to change the enemites into all different types...again, at the time I thought I did something great but it was really all someone else doing the actual work.

I don't even use a hex editor anymore, never even keep one handy.

0xFF is actually 255 which just means you broke the games internal limit or byte or character storage limit...i'm guessing setting it to 0 or trying to set it to -1 would have caused the same effect...basically you caused an overflow heh.

0xFFFF was a common variable we used in Visual Basic 6 for the max buffer size, basically 65535, the maximum fixed length string...whenever I want to use an old VB6 program with todays size limits I need to go back and modify that part to use larger strings or use multiple read/writes, back then it was fine...now with GB and TB its pretty much useless except for a text file :LOL:
 
whatnitrus

WhatNitrous

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Man, all this talk about programming and hexadecimal gives me a killer urge to go program something in a real language (lmao @ python), I actually insisted on making bitwise operators in our game because it would have been my normal way of doing things...but it really just turned into extra pointless effort in a python context for something that could be done much easier with just three integer consts instead considering python has no variation of a switch or select case statement.
 
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