
Hidden messages in Amiga games (2017) - danso
http://codetapper.com/amiga/random-rants/hidden-messages-in-amiga-games/
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rzzzt
Not copy protection related: the author of Prehistorik is just happy that
someone is still playing their game after many years (message is displayed at
startup):

[https://imgur.com/mF4UDTY](https://imgur.com/mF4UDTY)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/6qpjvm/til_if_you_s...](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/6qpjvm/til_if_you_start_prehistorik_a_game_from_1992_in/)

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yosser
I programmed Feud, my first Amiga game. I always wondered if anyone would find
Ste Pickfords' message (hidden behind a bridge IIRC). It's nice to see that 30
years later, yes someone has.

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skymt
There's a great wiki called The Cutting Room Floor that collects odds and ends
found inside video games: remnants of cut content, differences between regions
and revisions, and about a thousand examples of this sort of hidden message.

[https://tcrf.net/Category:Games_with_hidden_developer_messag...](https://tcrf.net/Category:Games_with_hidden_developer_messages)

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squarefoot
The hidden messages about piracy damaging the industry almost brought a tear.
If only they knew where the end would come from...

Too bad that evident mismanagement bringing companies to self destruction
isn't as illegal as piracy, and isn't sanctioned likewise. If it was, we
probably would still have Commodore and many others around along with who
knows what newer incarnation of the Amiga.

~~~
wolfgke
> Too bad that evident mismanagement bringing companies to self destruction
> isn't as illegal as piracy, and isn't sanctioned likewise. If it was, we
> probably would still have Commodore and many others around along with who
> knows what newer incarnation of the Amiga.

If the copyright laws did not exist, it would be much easier for these fanatic
Amiga fans to develop, build, and sell a new incarnation of the Amiga.

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mickeyp
I can only imagine how cathartic it must've been for some of those developers
to write those messages, even if it ultimately didn't help them much in the
end.

When people pirate stuff today it's easy to write it off as sticking it to
(mostly) faceless corporations, but back then, most of these games were
written by "hobbyists-turned-pro" or tiny outfits. Not unlike today's indie
developers, though I'd say people back then probably had fewer opportunities
to bounce back and even fewer ways of distributing their software. Especially
in Europe where a lot of Amiga users (and creators) lived.

It's ironic, in some ways, that the very BBSes these guys rail against in the
messages were the best channels for distributing games far and wide --- shame
it came about in an era where most developers had no means to sell it "online"
on the selfsame platforms.

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segfaultbuserr
> _GET THE HELL OUT OF OUR DISK._

It makes me remember some history - the absence of free and open source
mentality in the hobbyist scene. All of these examples came from commercial
games, which were meant to be sold commercially, and their hostility towards
crackers is completely understandable and justified. But it was not limited to
commercial programs, almost nothing was open source at that time.

An interesting historical fact everyone should be aware, is that before the
popularization of the World Wide Web, there was a huge gap between the
academic world of minicomputers, which brought us Unix, Internet, Usenet, 4.3
BSD, MIT-style hacking culture, free software movement; and the hobbyist world
of microcomputers, which brought us CP/M, C64, BASIC, IBM PC, Amiga, BBS,
Fidonet, Phreak/Whole Earth-style hacking culture (and some cracking), were
essentially two completely different worlds in parallel. The division was
largely caused by the fact that the formal world was inaccessible to ordinary
people without special status.

The most striking thing was the absence of free and open source mentality in
the hobbyist scene. There was a huge amount of free-as-in-beer software
powering the entire world of BBS, and lots of helpful microcomputer
communities, lot of system and development utilities, but almost nothing was
open source. Many authors saw their programs as the work of personal
dedication or an art, and believed no one but the author should be allowed to
have control over the program development. Program source was sometimes
released as "source-available" and the author may encourage improvements,
there were also a lot of type-in programs, but most do not explicitly grant
any rights of modification and redistribution ( _it 's very problematic, only
a few programs are generously relicensed under a free license or Public
Domain, and today many other programs are still available online, often with
source, but no 3rd-party hobbyist development at any scale is allowed due to
its copyright status, they became effectively mere personal reading materials
on the stone, and even as reading materials, the information you obtained by
reading them is still somewhat toxic. And I heard the holding company of C64
KERNAL refuses to license the code to most community replica projects..._).
The community worked mainly by Golden Rule - in fact you can do many things
based on those programs and code without authorization and licenses, as long
as the original author is not offended, but almost nothing could be taken for
granted! In today's world of GitHub, it was a virtually unimaginable time.

There were exceptions, and there were usually written by microcomputing
enthusiasts with an academic background, e.g. Li-Chen Wang's Tiny BASIC had a
copyright notice of "Copyleft, all wrongs reserved"; Ward Christensen's XModem
was explicitly released to the public domain, and it became one of the most
frequently-modified program in the entire history of microcomputer, and
ultimately evolved into ZModem.

However, the free and open source philosophy remained largely unpopularized in
the world of microcomputers, until Linus Torvalds' released Linux, an kernel
written for a 386, under GPL, and when dial-up Internet access became more
common. Only then, the city of hobbyists and the city of the academic became
one, and the two strands of hacking culture fully merged.

~~~
vidarh
It was not _quite_ that segregated.

By the late 80's things like the Fred Fish disks included source for a lot of
the programs, many ported from Unix systems with according licenses attached.

Microemacs, a variation of which Linus is a known longtime user, for example,
occurs in various versions on multiple Fish disks.

I'm skeptical of attributing the crossover so strongly to Linus - e.g. while
Aminet postdates Linux, I was used to source and sharing of source via Aminet
well before I'd even heard of Linux, but before that also Fish disks and other
of disks.

What is definitively true is that there was a big uptick as more people got
modems and were getting exposed more to free software thinking.

~~~
segfaultbuserr
> _It was not quite that segregated._

Fully agree.

> _Microemacs, a variation of which Linus is a known longtime user, for
> example, occurs in various versions on multiple Fish disks._

I knew Vim came from the Amiga community as a vi clone. But I didn't know
Microemacs was originally a microcomputer Emacs clone. Thanks for your
comment.

History is interesting, isn't it?

~~~
vidarh
I keep wanting to systematically go through the old source archives available
looking for gems.. There's so much to learn, be it history or interesting
ideas. I remembered Microemacs largely because I once started collecting code
from Fish disks that came with source, and it was notable for the sheer number
of versions.

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stagas
It is similar to the "View Source" comments you see on some sites nowadays,
but instead of the "Get out of here!" they figured it's more beneficial to
say: "We're hiring! Come work with us".

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ekianjo
> A message to crackers: Nobody wants copy protection. All it is designed to
> do is give a program a fighting chance. Now we realize that there is a great
> competition to see which group breaks this game first, however, if you do
> break it, please consider this: If you let this game out early after
> release, and there are few sales, it will be very difficult to justify
> followup games of this type. Nobody benefits; not the developers, not the
> users, and not the Amiga community.

Actually users benefit: they can get games without paying for them. Of course
it's a short term benefit if the market dies because of that, but saying as a
blanket statement that no-one benefits is just not reading the market well.
Also hardware manufacturers benefit from people buying hardware to play games.

~~~
_the_inflator
> Actually users benefit: they can get games without paying for them

That wasn't really the thing in the 80th and early 90th. The thing was, that
especially on the C64 the games got streamlined by good crackers by being one-
sided, fast-load added, and trained as well. This means, that cracks actually
featured a lot more benefits than the original. That's why many of us refused
to buy originals. There was one saying: "Good software is worth buying".

Sometimes the crackers even fixed bugs, added highscore savers, level picker
etc. The list could go on and on.

This is comparable to DVDs and their silly copy protection warning vs mpegs
without this thing.

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smallstepforman
Lotus Turbo Challenge II \-------------- I don't know, It's not up to me. But
if we did, it would be quite fun to release a compilation at a later date of
all of the trilogy, called Lotus 1-2-3....

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axilmar
So many messages against piracy...and there are some people online saying
piracy didn't kill the Amiga...

~~~
vidarh
I really don't think it did. While it may have deterred some software houses,
it also spurred hardware sales and without the hardware sales there'd not have
been _any_ software market. As an Amiga user at the time, I had plenty of
pirated software, but I still spent most of my money on it as well.

The amount of piracy was pretty much the same across all the platforms,
including the PC, which certainly survived...

What killed the Amiga was the severe Commodore mismanagement that meant e.g.
the intended followup to the ECS chipset never arrived - the chipset we did
get (AGA), too late to save Commodore, was started as a stopgap measure
because the intended next generation was _years_ behind schedule in a company
that in the 70's had several times designed and built computers from scratch
in 3-6 months. Commodore didn't figure out how to do product management and
engineering management in the face of systems with vastly increased complexity
where having a handful of engineers work on a single next gen iteration just
didn't cut it any more.

In the meantime Commodore were also pursuing any number of dead-end projects
that never saw the light of day (e.g. the "C65" Commodore 64 followup for
example), and had totally failed to actually rebuild a dealer network
(necessary because Tramiel figuratively burned the US dealer network to the
ground right before leaving) and actually market the Amiga in the US, relying
largely on European sales to carry the company when the 8-bit models sales
were falling off a cliff.

Any number of things could have saved it at the time it collapsed, though
seeing how Apple also struggled and nearly collapsed, it's not at all clear
what chances it'd have had for the long term.

