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It Took 33 Years To Find the Easter Egg In This Apple II Game (vice.com)
Jason Koebler writes: Gumball, a game released in 1983 for the Apple II and other early PCs, was never all that popular. For 33 years, it held a secret that was discovered this week by anonymous crackers who not only hacked their way through advanced copyright protection, but also became the first people to discover an Easter Egg hidden by the game's creator, Robert A. Cook. Best of all? Cook congratulated them Friday for their work.
The article attributes the discovery to a game-cracker named 4am, who's spent years cracking the DRM on old Apple II games to upload them to the Internet Archive. "Because almost all of the games are completely out of print, all-but-impossible to find, and run only on old computers, 4am is looked at as more of a game preservation hero than a pirate."
The article attributes the discovery to a game-cracker named 4am, who's spent years cracking the DRM on old Apple II games to upload them to the Internet Archive. "Because almost all of the games are completely out of print, all-but-impossible to find, and run only on old computers, 4am is looked at as more of a game preservation hero than a pirate."
I had a "cracked" copy of Gumball back in the middle 80's. I would regularly use Copy ][+'s Sector Editor to scan for messages that pirates would leave behind. I never mentioned it because I thought someone had already discovered it.
i.e. "The Fly" left a message in Mario Bros.
The reason this works is because the normal entry point is $0800 which is a JMP instruction. The next instruction starts the hidden message left behind.
For Gumball, the hints are triggered via Ctrl-Z during the intermission.
Every Apple 2 game reads the keyboard via:
It is trivial to search memory for these 3 bytes and see what keypresses the games respond to.
The hard part was to figure out what triggered _that_ hint. Fortunately you can scan memory for the joystick button 0 and joystick button 1 presses.
. /sarcasm Anyways, who knew using a sector editor counts as news these days.