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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."
Our racial purity is under attack by wetbacks, kikes, niggers, towelheads, chinks, and all the other kinds of slant eyes. Let's ensure that our racial purity and our heritage are preserved. We need to celebrate white history and white power. And we need a President who will protect our purity and help us restore white power throughout the world. Hillary Clinton will be that President. Let's not wait 33 years to address these pressing concerns. Also, despite what critics will say, I am not racist and neither is this post. However, my hate is strong and I'm damned proud of it. In fact, my hate is growing stronger as I speak to you people. Don't mod down my post. Embrace and support white power! Hillary 2016!
Played it briefly, and preferred Lode Runner (also from Brøderbund) ; and yes, I'm that old.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Abandonware has no basis in law. It's just another chickenshit way for pirates to try to justify breaking the law while pretending they're not doing so. At least have the courage to admit that you're a thief. Better yet, why is it too much to ask you to pay for your software instead of stealing it? Abandonware is still stealing.
4am is considered a hero by pirates who don't want to admit that they're pirates. Distributing abandonware is still piracy. That's the law.
"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."
Who views 4am in this manner? Copyright law sure doesn't. Please clarify this.
I know the editors are just shortening the title from TFA, but saying "this Apple II game" rather than the name of the game borders on clickbait. If you're going to rewrite the title (and you should, that's what a good editor does), then you may as well do it right and make it a properly descriptive title.
e.g. "Easter Egg Found After 33 Years in Apple II Game 'Gumball'" which is more descriptive and more space efficient, coming in at 3 characters shorter than the current Slashdot title.
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.
If it has any value, that will quickly be stomped out.
Captcha: describe
I had Suspended, Archon, Kareteka, Lode runner, Hard hat Mack, Moon Patrol, Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?, The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, Pinball construction set, Print shop, ProDos, USCD Pascal; and a few games I can't remember, on the Apple II. Since then, I've downloaded the DOS version of a few games so I could play them again. Still got those DOS files somewhere.
is anotha man's nigga.
You won't believe the name of the game, or what Tim Cook did next!
Was EditorDavid hired from Facebook? Clickbait is like newspeak with cancer.
...it is a rotten easter egg!
This copyright protection is 33 years old. Should we really be calling it "advanced"?
I'm curious as to why he's doing this when most A2 software is already cracked and available on Asimov.
Copy protection back then was really in its golden age. Off the top of my head I can remember a couple of different schemes:
1. manipulating the on-disk structures so that certain things couldn't be read. If you did a bit-for-bit copy (via locksimith etc) you wouldn't get a read error for that sector, which meant you were running a pirate copy.
2. manipulating the track layout so the drive could read the track, but a bit copier couldn't. I'm not sure how they did that, really. Did they write half a track and just join them together?
3. Self-modifying code. Yeah, this was a common thing: code would decrypt itself while running. This wouldn't prevent a bit-for-bit copy, but it would prevent the hack where you'd just find the copy protection subroutine and modify it to always return true.
There were doubtless more. Are the old Apple ][ cracking guides still online?
There were three tools that everyone used to use:
1. locksmith, AFAIK the first bit-for-bit copier
2. crackshot, which would dump your ram to storage. You could reload it into its running state
There was one more good bit copier, who's name I've forgotten. Oh, Back-it-Up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I thought the DOJ could still press criminal charges pursuant to 17 USC 506 if the lack of license is obvious and the infringement is either for financial gain or over a certain dollar amount. Back in the day, the Slashdot effect was strong enough to be a surefire way of getting to that dollar amount.
You know, I think looking at this that it's a little easy to say it was discovered now.
Who's to say it wasn't discovered by people playing back when it was published?
Let's face it, it's not like records of the period are detailed. I can imagine folks posting about it on their local BBS which in turn would get lost over time.
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.
Go, 4am & qkumba, go!
Mandatory XKCD
When it comes to preserving our digital history, I think it's better to ask forgiveness than permission.
If we followed copyright law to the letter, nothing would get preserved.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
If you LR fans didn't know about it from a few years ago (September 7th, 2014).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
http://www.broderbund.com/ and http://www.broderbund.com/sear... are still there! ;)
You know. I still use it (and other clones) today in Windows. I mainly make cheap paper cards. :O
BTW, http://www.reddit.com/r/loderu... and it needs more activites. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Perhaps some of the games on Asimov are on Asimov because he did them. Another possibility is that he wanted to document the cracks publicly, and not all cracks on Asimov are necessarily documented.