![]() In fact, just the opposite – I’ve had several authors find their own software and thank me for preserving it. ![]() They’ve never received one for anything in the 4am collection. They fully comply with DMCA takedown notices. I host the write-ups and deprotected software (as disk images) on. It’s been delightful.ĭid you have any concerns over copyright? Do you feel the ethical considerations over lost software outweigh the rights of the copyright owner to restrict distribution of their works? Along the way, I’ve discovered that educational software is rich with history, personality, humor, and technical achievement. ![]() I realized I could have a real impact while having just as much fun, just as much intellectual challenge. The holy grail was cutting away so much that you could distribute the game (or what was left of it) as a single file that could be combined with other unrelated games on a single floppy disk.ģ0 years later, that’s exactly what I saw: half-preserved arcade games, a smattering of educational software, and virtually nothing else. That meant stripping out the animated boot sequence, the title screen, the multi-page introduction, the cut scenes, anything deemed “non-essential” to the pirates. Those same technical constraints led to a culture where the smallest version of a game always won. So it never got preserved in any form.Īnd even the things that did get cracked weren’t fully preserved. Nobody got kudos for cracking “Irregular Spanish Verbs in the Future Tense,” no BBS would waste the hard drive space to host it, and no user would sacrifice their phone line to download it. In the 1980s, this meant storage space and network speed. Preservation is driven by pirates, who are driven by ego but constrained by the technical limitations of their era. I mentioned this to Jason Scott, and he set me straight. And it slowly dawned on me that maybe not everything has been cracked. Surely everything has been cracked? Perhaps it was just mis-named or mis-filed? Then I found another disk that seemed to be a first-time preservation. One of those eBay lots had an educational game, “Ten Little Robots.” After cracking it, I couldn’t find any copies of it online, which seemed odd. I decided to leave out the crack screens, although a handful of my early cracks do have Easter eggs where you can see “4am” if you know how to trigger it. I decided to document my methods because I enjoy technical writing and because I had admired the classic crackers who had done so. ![]() So I set out to create “complete” cracks that faithfully reproduced the original experience. Repton has a multi-page introduction that explains the “back story” of the game. ![]() To my surprise, the originals had more content than I remembered! Sneakers has an animated boot sequence. In late 2013, I acquired a real Apple //e and bought a few lots of original disks on eBay, mostly arcade games that I had acquired illicitly in my youth: Sneakers, Repton, Dino Eggs. I PEEK’d and POKE’d and CALL’d many late nights as a teenager, but I could never quite put it all together. I also admired the few who documented their methods in cracking tutorials, initially distributed as BBS text files and later collated and redistributed on disk. Pirated software was rampant, and I idolized the crackers whose names I saw flash and scroll on the crack screens of the games I traded with my friends. My parents bought themselves an Apple //e when I was 10, and it quickly came to dominate my leisure time. It’s tempting to rewrite history and give myself some noble purpose for starting this hobby, but in this case the truth makes for a better story. Why did you choose to start aggressively de-protecting, archiving and re-distributing Apple II software? ![]()
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