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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."
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...
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 when:
1- you can't buy it
2- you can't run it
3- it's worthy of archival
4- to figure out who can invoke the DMCA would be extremely costly
for society recovering abandonware into a state that is usable is better than losing the product.
Who gives a shit about a law, which has nothing to do with justice or any decency at all?
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.
"l'esprit de la loi, ou la lettre". It's clear to see which part you chose : the brainless one
...it is a rotten easter egg!
You're confusing law with ethics.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
This copyright protection is 33 years old. Should we really be calling it "advanced"?
DMCA doesn't apply here. The Constitution explicitly forbids ex post facto laws. The DMCA doesn't apply to software, etc, prior to it's enactment in 1998.
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.
Presumably because Gumball wasn't on Asimov.
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.
No one said they wouldn't buy it if it was for sale. But who even owns the software at this point to sell it? Copyright in this case is probably harming sales (and you can bet even if you figured out who to pay the people that worked on it (the developers, management, executives, etc) will receive none of the money from a sale.
With that said, there is a reason I have a large collection of old software and licenses (Windows 3.1 - 98SE. Windows NT4/2000/XP/7, Mac System 7,Mac OS 8/9, DOS, games from Kings Quest to StarCraft, Office 2000-2010). Some things only the backup copy is still functional, but I don't like playing in grey areas.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
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.