
Give Yourself More Playtime (2015) - martinrue
https://martinrue.com/give-yourself-more-playtime/
======
ssdsa
I wonder if he really was afraid of the government, or if he was just tried to
keep his brother from loading the games. The part where he actually cuts the
physical tape is great. The funny thing is that, without cutting the tape,
anybody can load the games any way, just like this: Rewind the tape. LOAD the
first program (i.e. the password program). Note that the tape is positioned
after the password program now. Reset the C64. Enter LOAD to load the actual
game.

~~~
dep_b
Or rewind, reset the counter, load the protection, write down the number in
one of those math copy books and fast forward to the same number every time. I
still have a box full of tapes and those books.

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_ph_
Great story. Also, a great learning experience. This is what I liked about the
old times of the C64 and others, they invited so much for these learning
experiences. Good old times :)

But even today, many years later and working as a software developer, my
greatest source of innovation are the at the beginning goofy ideas and silly
experiments.

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wiz21c
Reminds me when I wrote my first .COM infecting virus. It worked very well. It
infected COMMAND.COM and then the rest of the hard drive. Unfortunately, it
had a bug so programs wouldn't work anymore (except command.com).

And I did the test on the PC of a friend of my dad.

A very long moment of loneliness happened to 15 y.o. wannabe hacker when dad
and his friend realized the mess :-)

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abiogenesis
Interesting story, but probably a false memory as Commodore 64 did not auto
run programs loaded from tape or disk by default.

Sinclair Spectrum did, but that was also easily be circumventable by using the
MERGE command instead of LOAD.

~~~
Flow
It could auto-run from tape. Take a look:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UoF6_nXMSw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UoF6_nXMSw)

But from disk drive you needed to type LOAD"*",8,1 for it to load into
something other than BASIC start address.

~~~
tinus_hn
I think you could also autorun from disk as everything is memory mapped on the
C64, but you couldn’t make it reliable nor portable.

~~~
tinus_hn
See for instance this page which explores some of the possibilities (and
problems)

[https://www.pagetable.com/?p=568](https://www.pagetable.com/?p=568)

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paultopia
This is a legitimately awesome story---possibly the most delightful thing I've
ever read from HN. That is all.

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twsted
> Eventually I learned that POKE allows you to change values at specific
> memory addresses

I remember, with my first TI99/4A home computer, reading tons of program
listings and trying to port Vic 20, C64, Spectrum, etc programs to it.

Many of the programs had hundreds of peeks and pokes, which the TI99 lacked. I
thought it was an additional super power that I was missing. The envy.

I eventually got them with the Mini Memory module and the Extended Basic. Soon
I discovered they were not "compatible".

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jenshk
That's an awesome story. "Play around more. Discover things." indeed!

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Farbklex
The moral of the story is: Use a password manager.

