The big highschool liar

Tonks · Post by **Tonks** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 7:42 pm

Back in the 1980's when I was in high school, a number of us Vic 20 owners were making our first attempts at creating our own games. They were just about all totally crap!!!

However there was one guy in our class who would pass around blank tapes containing his latest game. The games were always really good with impressive graphics and sound. Being silly teenagers we just believed him and regarded him as the greatest programmer in the school.

Now that my Vic 20 game collection is growing all the time I have discovered that this great programmer was nothing more than a cheat. I have bought many tape games that have been the exact games this guy claimed to have created. Many more have been listings I found in old computer magazines that I have added to my collection. All he had done was make some slight changes to the title screens to add his name instead of the original author.

Have you ever had the wool pulled over your eyes?

Post by **Jeff-20** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 12:57 am

Ha ha! That's just hillarious. I've had a similar situation. I once played a joke on my brother and made a really impressive game title screen, but when he pressed fire to begin it revealed my practical joke... SYNTAX ERROR!

Schema · Post by **Schema** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 7:31 am

Heh. I once tried to fool my parents into thinking I was "talking" to my C64. I used SAM SAYIT with a bunch of pre-scripted sentences in a little BASIC program. I would "ask" the C64 a question, then kick a joystick hidden under the desk so the program would go on to the next line in the script.

Not sure if they were fooled (doubtful), they just said "very nice". I was about 14 at the time.

Boray · Post by **Boray** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 7:40 am

I discovered that a guy had stolen a bunch of tracker mod tunes ones. He had just changed the credit notes and put them on his homepage. And I knew this guy a little over the net... We had talked about music etc over the net so when I found out I got pretty upset. Without telling him anything, I tracked down most of the original tunes on the net and emailed most of the original artists and told them about it and soon his guestbook was full of hateful messages. He closed his homepage very fast after that...

/Anders

ral-clan · Post by **ral-clan** » Mon Jan 30, 2006 12:04 pm

Well, back in the early 80s at my elementary school (I was in grade 6 I think) people with VIC-20s would often swap bags of games on cassette for the weekend. You would borrow someones games, copy all the ones you wanted, and then return the originals on Monday.

I traded games with a guy who was a bit of a bully, and when I got my bag back much later (after bugging and bugging him to bring it - he always "forgot) it was missing my "Froggee" cassette. This was one of my favourite games and to us was uncopyable (we didn't know how to defeat the copy protection).

I told him about it and he said I never gave it to him. I was pretty sure my Froggee tape was sitting in his VIC-20 games box, and that he had decided to keep it for his own. I was pretty angry about that...what a jerk!

Ghislain · Post by **Ghislain** » Mon Jan 30, 2006 12:38 pm

A lot of my VIC-20 games contain the company name "System IIII". This was a VIC-20 club consisting of me and three other school friends. I was around 12 or 13 when it started, it ended around the time I was 14 or 15.

We were supposed to develop games as a group but it was just them telling me ideas for the games they wanted and me doing all the work

(they didn't know how to program at all). One time, they even tried to claim to me that they programmed "Lucy the Lizard" while I wasn't around!

I didn't really mind giving them "group credit" for my games, I just liked to have an enthusiastic audience for them (which they were) as opposed to showing the games to my parents and them saying "yes, that's nice" (like it was pointed out in a previous message).

What games did I develop while I was part of the "Original System IIII" ? If my memory serves me correctly, they were:

-ICE HOCKEY (no custom characters just a pair of SHIFT Q characters fighting over a puck!) - LOST, however I made an updated version in 1996
-WORM-OUT (Kind of like a cross between Killer Comet and Centipede) - I think I might still have this, I'll have to look for it)
-100 METER DASH (shake the joystick left and right and watch the stick figure break the world record!)
-PRO WRESTLING (human stick figure vs cpu stick figure, press a key and make a wrestling move!) - LOST, but I made an updated version around 1991 or so, I'll try to find it.
-VIC WARS (use a SHIFT V to shoot down tie fighters... the game started with a special theme song from a famous movie!) - LOST, it's a crap game anyhow!
-VIDEO QUEST I-V (a series of RPG games that were a precursor to DUNJON I+II) - LOST

Another funny thing about this little group, I no longer had a VIC-20 during this time (my first VIC-20 had fried), so I went to a friend's house who had a Commodore 64, and I used a special VIC-20 emulator from a Compute! magazine type in program to do my development.

So I still use "System IIII" on my games as an homage to that little VIC-20 club from the days of my youth.

Tepic · Post by **Tepic** » Mon Jan 30, 2006 12:39 pm

There was a bully in my school when I was 12 who had a Vic. We used to swap games a lot, he even loaned my an 8k expansion so I could play some of his!

If we wern't talking about the Vic he was a real evil SOAB and beat me up often. If I saw him coming I'd pull something "viccy" out of my pocket and he'd leave me alone

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Mon Jan 30, 2006 2:12 pm

ral-clan wrote:I traded games with a guy who was a bit of a bully, and when I got my bag back much later (after bugging and bugging him to bring it - he always "forgot) it was missing my "Froggee" cassette.

As late as in high school, I once lended a (copied) C64 disk to an older guy. It took a while to get the disk back, and when he finally found it, it had been jammed into his locker so it was smashed beyond recognition. I was quite upset, and only managed to rescue parts of the disk contents. These days I can download it from e.g. Arnold, but some of the files on the disk does not seem to have a match. I'm forever thankful it was not an original disk I lended.. augh.

ral-clan · Post by **ral-clan** » Mon Jan 30, 2006 2:31 pm

Ghislain wrote:A lot of my VIC-20 games contain the company name "System IIII". This was a VIC-20 club consisting of me and three other school friends. I was around 12 or 13 when it started, it ended around the time I was 14 or 15.

In Brampton, Ontario myself and two other friends had a weekly VIC-20 club too. We called ourselves the "Vic User's Group" which had the unfortunate acronym VUC!

Besides trading and playing games, one of our goals was to program and release a series of Trivia type games to be called "Quizmaster Pursuit" (not very imaginative, but we were 11 years old!). I had to program one along the theme of "Horror & Mystery" or something like that.

It was a pretty futile excercise considering that none of us had much knowledge of BASIC programming. I had the most knowledge and that basically came from the VIC-20 user's manual. Still, I did a fairly nice looking intro screen using the PRINT commands and the VIC's custom characters. I also programmed it so it would play the mystery music "Dum-da-dum-dum". That's about as far as I got but it I don't think the other fellows got any further and they were impressed with what I had done. I even drew a little cassette cover for it.

I actually (and amazingly) recently found that game I started to program and still have a copy!

As I recall, we even had a silly idea of wearing uniforms to the meetings. We had to wear grey pants and a white shirt (this was another guy's idea, not mine). Anyway, like I said, we were 11 years old!

Eventually the group petered out.

I do remember one time we tried to copy a cool 16K copy-protected game (Centipod?) by holding a microphone of one mono tape recorder up to the speaker of another......had to listen to about 5 minutes of that SQUEEEALLLLLING, and no, it didn't work. But our mothers upstairs wondered what the heck was going on.

Speaking of that....has anyone ever been able to copy a VIC tape with a double tape deck's dubbing feature? I tried a few years ago before I had a X-1541 or TAP cable, but no matter how careful I was with the settings and tape quality it never worked.

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Mon Jan 30, 2006 2:59 pm

I have copied a few C64 games, mostly slow but I believe also custom turbo loading. As you say, it can be hard to get it right, and those hard copies were not quite reliable to load back.

vic user · Post by **vic user** » Mon Jan 30, 2006 3:02 pm

i am loving reading these posts!

chris

Leeeeee · Post by **Leeeeee** » Tue Jan 31, 2006 2:36 am

Speaking of that....has anyone ever been able to copy a VIC tape with a double tape deck's dubbing feature?

A friend had a really cheap double deck that only had one motor so you couldnt rewind one tape while playing the other. It also had a "double speed" copy feature and that worked on most normal tapes and some turbo tapes.

Once we had more than one C2N cassette between us we made up a Y lead and could copy anything.

Lee.