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Comment by rando3826 | Hacker News Reader

I'm sceptical that the person hacking your console lived in the same apartment complex.

175 Calvert Drive in Cupertino. Kind of a dump in the early 80s, probably all condos now [checks . . . nope, still there. Yuck].

I think one of us noticed the other carrying some Atari equipment in the parking lot, and we started chatting. Sure, a bit unlikely, but this was Silly Valley. I think the guy worked for Lockheed and cracking software was a hobby.

I kind of had this fellow in mind when I wrote the protection code. I figured it wouldn't stand up very long, and in fact, three days was a moral victory as far as I was concerned. I think he had as much fun with the code as I did :-)

> Silly Valley

Fair enough. I suppose that term will stay in my head now.

Games was a much smaller world back then, and pretty much everyone with a 8-bit system had tried their hand at both writing games and hacking other peoples. When you write assembly language yourself, and own a debugger, then everything is "open source".

Well, not for me :-)

I cracked a few games, looked at someone else's code but I can assure you that at the ASM level, it's very hard to understand that phong-shading routine to the point you can actually re-code it yourself...

(yes, I've tried :-))

stF

Depends on the game. Some games had so few comments that they looked pretty much like a disassembly (Pac-Man for the Atari 800 had exactly two comments in it -- one was a copyright statement, the other was "Ha!", on the critical write-to-ROM for its rather pathetic implementation of copy protection).

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