The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Twenty

slobberchops (74) in truestories • 5 years ago (edited)

This series is dedicated to my friend ‘The Pieman’ who hosted ‘THE P.I.T.S’ BBS in New York City and sadly passed away in 2016. I know his son ‘Blake’ will be reading this sequence of stories with anticipation.

We will never forget you man, you were one of a kind.

Also I would like to say a big thank you to Fabulous Furlough, ex-leader of ‘The Humble Guys’ who helps me fill in the gaps of what happened almost 30 years ago, The Slavelord who has given me a plethora of memories from the early days and to Suicidal Tendencies (@trolleydave) who remembers more about the UK scene than me.

The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) is a continuation of my previous series, The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops.

I was once known as 'Bryn Rogers', a member of THG (The Humble Guys).

…’Warning, very geeky content coming up, you probably won’t understand a word but feel free to try’…
November 1992

The BBS Advertisements

I was noticing some of the uploads to the Demon’s Forge now contained up to three of four BBS ads and so I added a pre-written PCBoard tool to remove known ones from the zip files.

Every time a new one appeared, I would add it to the list as I didn’t want ‘my warez’ cluttered up with these foreign ads.

Of course a Demon’s Forge ad was perfectly acceptable and added while removing those scummy other ones.

The .nfo file was invented by THG some years beforehand and was an information file that contained cracking notes, instructions, a list of members and BBS numbers and sometimes insulting colourful language to rival groups.

Now it was the standard for BBS ads, and they were getting plainly irritating.

...'BBS Ads nearly always contained ANSI, some were great looking but none were welcome in my .zip files'...

Hi.T.Moonweed was also using the same ad remove tool and mentioned most smugly he was removing The Demon’s Forge ads on The Flying Teapot.

I was quite incensed by his proclamation and recruited my mate @steddyman (known as Slurpyman – THG in later times) to add a little extra spice to my ad’s.

He was quite the wiz with Visual C++ in those days and knocked up a small .exe file for me in no time at all.

‘just run this using the following parameters’, he said...

'admod.exe DEMONSFO.NFO DEMONSFO.OUT'

I knocked up a batch file to do the renaming and deleting, and after some testing was pleased to find that the ad remover no longer worked on the new DEMONSFO.NFO ads.

…’@steddyman had inserted a non-printable character into the ad and so the binary matchup no longer worked with the ad delete application’…

After boasting to Hi.T.Moonweed that my ad’s would now reside in warez uploaded to The Flying Teapot, he called me a few hours later once again very smugly that he just needed to re-add my .NFO file to the ad remover and they were once again being removed.

...'the Demon's Forge ad was most welcome in ALL zip files of course. See the little 'à' in the top left corner on the 'D'?, that's the trademark of the @steddyman admod.exe!'...

This was getting serious, and after some more talks to @steddyman, he modified the admod.exe so that it added a random character from the ASCI 8 Bit ranks into part of the white space on my ad.

Hi.T.Moonweed now had to concede defeat. Unless he wanted to manually remove my DEMONSFO.NFO ads from all his zip files future ones were going to stay put.

The Carl Lewis Challenge

This event likely happened in mid-1992, not November and it’s something that I remember with some fondness, though I doubt @steddyman agrees.

I had been contacted by Mr Bond, my supplier who was the manager at the local computer store. He announced a new hot game was ready for me to collect.

...'Look at those graphics...., so good that it may have passed for a Lamers of Power release!'...

A joystick waggling game was not my idea of ‘hot’ but nevertheless I grabbed the single 720Kb 3.5’ floppy disk of ‘The Carl Lewis Challenge’, wildly drive home breaking speed limits and frantically tried to contact JRoK who didn’t answer the bloody phone.

Fabulous Furlough also proved uncontactable and so that evening I took the game to @steddyman’s place promising him riches, fame, glory beyond his wildest dreams and possibly THG membership if he could crack it within five minutes.

Two hours later, sweating profusely and sporting bloodstained eyes due to staring at code using Soft-Ice he conceded defeat.

Source

’I can’t concentrate with you bastards pouring over my shoulder with expectation’, he bemoaned to me and Illicit Trader who ran a local THG Distribution site named Carnage.

…’the pressure of being a famous international cracker was unfortunately a little too much for @steddyman’…

Later that evening TDT released. ‘The Carl Lewis Challenge’ courtesy of Hard Core, and we figured it wouldn’t have mattered.

There were further stages of testing (without Virtual Machines!), packaging, writing the .NFO file adding relevant profanity to whoever deserved it at the time and then it would need to be distributed.

At time likes these I used to take The Demon’s Forge down in order to spread THG releases faster.

Time was of the essence and uploading to The PITS, Unlawful Entry and The Elusive Dream in that order critical.

...'Major Theft ran Unlawful Entry, TDT's World HQ. You had to be quick to get releases uploaded on this BBS, it was lightning quick'...

Very recently I brought up this memory to @steddyman and he explained the protection was layers of self-modifying code. It was not an unusual methodology but taxing to crackers.

…’the self-modifying went four or five levels deep, in the end I just couldn’t be arsed’…

It is a long running local joke now that he spurned fame and failed to crack his first game for THG.

However this was just that start of the unwilling @steddyman’s budding career as a THG cracker, his day and that prestigious life changing membership would come later.

To be continued...

All images have been cited and are under the category 'Labelled for Reuse' or are in the public domain.

Small Pirate Icon Source

.NFO files courtesy of the .NFO libraries at https://defacto2.net

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5 years ago by slobberchops (74)

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meesterboom (78) · 5 years ago

Sounds like it was a great time of your life man!

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slobberchops (74) · 5 years ago

I wouldn't have missed it for anything, but you could only do it for so long.., I was shagging a demented divorcee in a long term relationship at the time.. those memories tarnish this part of my life a little.

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meesterboom (78) · 5 years ago

A demented divorcee. Lol. I love that phrase. I shagged one too in the late nineties. I wonder if it was a nineties thing or a divorcee thing :0D

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slobberchops (74) · 5 years ago

Ah she wasn't the only one, in the very late eighties I got some serious training from a married three times, divorced three times specimen.

You saw nine and a half weeks at some time in your life?

Yes, I guess it was that period in time.., hitch a divorcee!

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meesterboom (78) · 5 years ago

Lol, yeah. It was just becoming cool :0)

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bozz (70) · 5 years ago

Wow, this sounds like it was some really intense stuff back then. I can't say as though I have ever been involved in anything as interesting. I did do some visual C++ coding back in college, but it was never anything that great. I think I made a unit conversion application for my dad one time.

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slobberchops (74) · 5 years ago

I think I could make such an app myself now being semi-fluent in VB.NET and console apps, but wasn't so much into coding then besides shell scripting.

@steddyman was very accommodating and got all the games he wanted zero day from me of course in compensation.

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steevc (73) · 5 years ago (edited)

This scene pretty much passed me by. I may have been using Amiga BBSs around then, but I was happy enough with PD/shareware. A friend was into acquiring cracked games, but I had enough to keep me busy. I do wish I'd liked to have got more into things like the demo scene as I could have learnt a lot on the programming side.

It all seems a long time ago and I'll have forgotten a lot. Sadly I have no Amiga kit these days. I could try dredging up some memories for a True Story.

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slobberchops (74) · 5 years ago

I could try dredging up some memories for a True Story.

Why not..., they seem to be appreciated round here.

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steem-plus (73) · 5 years ago

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steemitboard (66) · 5 years ago

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steddyman (43) · 5 years ago

I think the real issue for me with this game was that:
A. It was boring
B. It was awful
C. I didn't want to play it

Those things don't really add up to something I want to spend countless hours cracking :)

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The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Twenty

The BBS Advertisements

The Carl Lewis Challenge

To be continued...

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Hi @slobberchops!

Evaluation of your UA score:

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