Question for Bobby Binder re: VCP

[slidekellyslide]

Originally Posted by FrankWakefield

First, I'm glad Barry has gotten beyond Jordan Marsh & Co.

Next, let us all praise what a great thing the Commodore 64 was. I had one. Still have it. Once in a while I think of getting it out. That little pc did quite a bit with a small amount of memory. It was always fun chasing through the disk sectoring and copying protection efforts.

It was very easy hacking C64 disk games...not so easy hacking the cartridge games. I used to love playing Castle Wolfenstein and Lode Runner...also the Epyx Summer Games was a favorite.

[FrankWakefield]

I liked Silent Service, Dnieper River Line (I think that's what it was), Pirates was fun... and somewhere I got something that I think was called Campaign Manager. It simulated running around in the 50 states, fundraising, campaigning, doing ads, in a presidential election. No fancy graphics, but the game seemed fairly well thought out.

And I enjoyed the Avalon Hill games of Midway and B-1 Bomber. There was a 3rd game about nuclear war that they did, your country was a little grid, each round you could build a missile site, a nuclear sub, strategic bombers, or eventually ABMs. It was very simple, yet interesting. I rewrote the code for B-1 Bomber and created what I called "Backfire Bomber" with a Soviet bomber coming in toward New York or Washington, it was easy to do using the B-1 Bomber framework.

I recall one of the early safeguards to slow hacking was to have several "delete"s after the name of a file. So the filename might be FOX, which would then be F-O-X-deletekey-deletekey-deletekey , and with that if someone tried to list the files on a disk the FOX file wouldn't show up on the screen at all... But, if you had a printer (seldom attached to a gamer's C-64) you could print the directory and see F-O-X-deletekey-deletekey-deletekey , it was low technology piracy protection. Those rascals.

[slidekellyslide]

I never had a printer...I was still a kid, and $200+ for something I wasn't really going to use much just wasn't in the budget.

[Sixtofan]

I loved my C64, it was the last time I actually knew how to program. Favorite game - Ultima 3
Frank - I had that election game too, had forgotten all about it.