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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.
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.
You're confusing law with ethics.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Well, at that time all the data from the floppy disk was read by the OS. ... with special "SECTOR START" markers it would recognize: here starts a sector. And after the "SECTOR START" would be the sector number. ... I forgot the original schema. It was a bit more complicated. Not sure if I mix up here the layout of sectors on the hardware or how e.g. DOS 3.3 allocated files. (Files where allocated in linked lists of sectors, the last bytes of a sector holding the link to the next sector. I think now, it was more file structure and not disk structure that interleaved sectors)
In other words, there was no command to the disk controller to read or write to track 11/sector 5.
The OS had to step the disk reading arm to track 11 and start reading
As it took so long to react on that sectors would not be organized on a track in a consecutive manner but like 1 3 2 4 5 7
Sectors "where supposed" to be 256 bytes. But no one stopped you to have shorter or longer sectors. Because the sector markers where also hard wired into the drive. (That is your number 2)
Other tricks where puncturing the disk at a certain spot. So reading by the original game would give an error, and a copy by a Locksmith copy. The rumors at that time ofc were: they use a laser to puncture the disk.
Locksmith was a famous copy program as it used block wise reads and also the second memory card, so in two read and write sweeps it copied a disk in like 2 minutes (more close to 1) while ordinary copying by hand would take 5 or more.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
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).