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Comment by farkanoid | Hacker News Reader

Love it! It reminds me of a utility on my old Amiga 1000 that allowed you to view the entire contents of RAM as a large scrollable bitmap.

If you ran a game such as Marble Madness, rebooted the machine, then started the viewer program, very frequently you'd find corrupted remnants of the game assets such as sprites and backdrops as you scrolled.

I was young and absolutely amazed by it. Unfortunately I can't remember the name, only that it came on a disk with 'The Alliance Anti-Virus Collection' hand-written on the label. It had many other cool utilities, some which hijacked the "Insert Workbench" screen to play chiptunes and display scrolling text

Bitter-sweet memories.

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I wrote such a tool on A500 called "Aspro" with visual memory scanning so one could spot bitmaps and adjust step, save/load files, 68K disassembler and other things I can't remember. It could be invoked with hotkeys during games or demos. Too bad I lost it. Fun times.

Argh, I just tried googling "The Alliance Anti-Virus Collection" and got seriously wet-fished by the tip-of-tongue variant of https://xkcd.com/979/. Minor whiplash incoming :(

So, variations on that string eventually find three results:

- This HN thread (Google be fast)

- Someone describing the same disk using very similar terms and with from a similar location ⁽ʰᶦ ᶠʳᵒᵐ ˢʸᵈⁿᵉʸ ᵇᵗʷ⁾, which I'd be surprised (to say the least) to learn is not you: https://forum.amiga.org/index.php?topic=73527.15#msg838909

- ThIs InFuRiAtInG dEaD-eNd PoSt FrOm 2006 ("MoSt ReCeNt UsEr AcTiViTy SeP 2007"): https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=1332424#td_post_28845... - the attachment (which Google indexed) contains... "Alliance Anti-Virus Collection v8.00 (19xx)(The Alliance).zip"... D: D: D': ... and the username "jjsmith" doesn't really turn up anywhere else...

- Further extrapolation finds (via the miracle of working OCR and then "where on earth is that in the actual magazine"): https://archive.org/details/Australian_Commodore_and_Amiga_R... - at the bottom of the leftmost column ("Killing the IRQ virus"): "To check for the IRQ Virus, use Jon Potter's program POPDIR in Mega-disc 10, or pick version 7.0 of the Alliance Anti-Virus Pack from Prime Artifax on (02) 817-0011." Wow, a 7-digit phone number. I only very very vaguely remember those.

So, why on earth post this given that it's a giant dead end?

Well, this is Amiga. Way I look at it, based on the data available, I think it's promisingly likely that repeated pokings at the woodwork over time may actually make something nice fall out, maybe even sooner rather than later. It's a small community nowadays, IIUC. So maybe keep knocking?

I wonder what would happen if you poked around on EAB.

There's also the "Prime Artifax" route - googling finds a very small number of results (https://google.com/search?q=%22prime+artifax%22+bbs, http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=1537713, http://amigan.1emu.net/aw/) but enough to make me wonder if maybe someone might have mirrors/dumps indexed by that that they don't realize contains this disk.

> Someone describing the same disk using very similar terms and with from a similar location ⁽ʰᶦ ᶠʳᵒᵐ ˢʸᵈⁿᵉʸ ᵇᵗʷ⁾, which I'd be surprised (to say the least) to learn is not you: https://forum.amiga.org/index.php?topic=73527.15#msg838909

Christ, that's embarrassing, you've found me! Seems I'm stuck repeating the same thing every decade without even realizing it! Excellent sleuth work :-)

I'm tempted to try my luck messaging 'jjsmith' on the abime.net forums, and might just pull on the Prime Artifax route... Thanks for your help with this

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