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Heya Subzero.
Never used car to bring originals to anyone.
Once used a UPS like mail for the 3D game called HUNTER. Couldn’t pack it for some reasons and it was far above our Parisian cracker’s skills.
Ralf wasted the protection it in a matter of hours.See ya
Gotta end the next chapter. It is almost done somewhere on my HD.
However, Im afraid that it may hurt some SkidRow’s and Pdx fans.
@WayneK :
Hoan was a french cracker. As far as I can remember, he’s been part of "Black Monks" (french division) and "ACES" (short living group). At the time I was part of Angels (oh god, pardon me), they were not working with him. They worked with Mr C in Belgium (formerly cracker @ The Band. Always refused to sign his cracks hence the various rumors). He’s never failed a crack so actually, yes, someone probably messed up and Hoan was known to be … well "missing" some protections.@ Subzero :
C’mon. There is no hate in my posts.Actually yeah. Even tho’ their games were plain crap they did a great job at busting sceners
However, the last wave of massive busts was linked the bl*e boxi*g era and government owned phone company action.About Germany having best groups…
There is one thing France (and also the U.S) both have and you guys don’t : it is a legal system that won’t let you mess with the telecom or software companies.
You’d hardly name one known guy in the french business who hadn’t slept atleast one night in a french jail (Ackerlight, B Monks, Angels, Paradox, Quartex, The Company and so on).
Some stayed longer, some had to pay massive bills, others got their hardware confiscated, and so on…
Do you remember of many french BBS’? (+33). In other countries you could run a BBS for AGES without a slight problem (even in the U.S tho’). Not here. It was like inviting the cops home.As for our US mates, being caught out there for blue boxing, carding or such could be a real pain.
Police and private investigators simply protect public and private interests. The hard way.
Guys, I remember running (with my mate link) in a commercial center, the original "Another world" in my left hand, and being followed by 3 cops. The guys simply identified our contact in a shop who was bringing games out for us before they really hit the shelves.
I already went busted 1 month earlier and cops took my hardware (and cash!), left me one night in jail, prosecution and all that shit.
No risk, no fun.In countries such as Germany, the police would send you a postcard telling you "Hey bad boy, we know what you’re doing. It is not good. You should ask your mummy about it. Also, you should stop being a bad boy or else you can forget about your Santa Klaus’ list".
Cool.In France, every two years or so, heads were being cut by a massive police action, bringing back the entire scene to day 0.
In Germany (and almost everywhere else), you could expect to last for a decade without a single problem.So some had a mature scene with rock solid groups/friendship/experience, doing the long run.
The others had some sort of latin anarchy – competition, where most sceners were acting like if there was no tomorrow.It is not like you could play the "50 games counter". The police was the one ringing the end bell.
@ Heavy : That’s an idea ..
@ Gonthar : Mail is in the box! Hell, yeah, can’t remember a failed crack. I know that your guy was dedicated to quality. He remembers me of Gaston (Rebels, Hyperion, Fairlight). When I once left Skid Row to form "Sprint", Gaston joined us (at Sprint). The guy refused to release Turrican (we would have been first, few hours ahead) coz the END SCENE was not working (original was corrupt).
the guy had been testing every single level to find this out and simply refused the idea of a 100% fix coming up later the same day. Very few guys like ’em around at that time.@ Gonthar : The Band was prolly one of the best group at its time. Even tho’ Duncan was a rather strange guy, he surely was the real guy behind Angels. One of my mates "Megablast" (CPU, Dragons, Angels), formerly "Krapula" i think, was once part of The Band. He told us a lot of good things about this group.
However, bringing Angels to that level was a true miracle (given the fact that the french side was full of nice but true lamers).Anyway, the kind of spirit you’re talking about wasn’t too common anymore back in the early 90’s.
I remember going nut at Gaston (the cracker, ex-Horizon), in Sprint (short living group) coz he refused to release our version of Turrican.
We would have been first but he said that the very last stage was fucked up coz my original was corrupt… No 100% version, ne release. Old spirit fundamentalist that is!Skid Row was more like … "Huh, let’s release this half cracked game so that other groups will give up their work when they’ll see our version being spread alll around. In the mean time we’ll work out some patches".
@ Trackah123 : Exactly. A little core of a few guys was the key.
@ zeg : Yup nice one. The guys at Titus Software were far from kidding. Their games sucked anyway.
=> Gonthar : The Band sure rocked the early Amiga days. I wouldn’t be able to say wether it was #1 or #5 but it sure was an example for further teams (working releases, nice ole school intros, ..). Too bad Duncan wasted his time trying to rebuild somethingwith a bunch of hopeless frenchies. But that is another story and, however, he’s successfully brought to a very high point anyway.
=> Banditt : Damnit, Banditt you still there ? So hell is so full even Satan couldn’t reserve a small room for you down there.
Trackah123 : Not all the old crackers were great coders/programmers.
Look at the Skid Row guys for instance. They plain sucked (really). But still they’ve set a low standard (like china does in our days) so to stay into competition, other groups lowered down quality of their releases. The good point is that they proved that, sometimes, germans can release poor low end products. Still, most of their members had very limited brain capacities (look at Subzero for instance. They are close to monkey’s level).Flaming a problem ? lol. No. Narcs, traitors, cops helpers and all that crap : THAT was a problem.
Flaming is just part of the entire game … You sometimes you respect some guys you’re flaming a lot more than some guys who are not even worth a reply.[hr]
Time for a new start[hr]
There is one sure thing : Idiot losers remain idiot losers. And if the Angels guys were nice, they started being big headed. Stupid + big headed was a little too much to us.
So, together with my old Dragons mates (Mr Video and Corsair) we decided to leave Angels.And joined Classic.
And left Classic (1 week later) …
= Pause =
Why leaving this fast growing cracking group soooo fast ? Coz I guess that they were growing so fast that they didn’t even had the time to crack the originals I had for them …
=> Play =>So we joined Skid Row!
Wow. That is some serious band : crackers, bbs’, cards, money, hackers all over the world, phone conferences, members, members, members, members.
So many members that the leaders couldn’t even count them all.
However.
They could crack the serious load of originals that started flooding from my Amiga to their crackers’ computers (mainly FFC & Ralph, not to mention them). And that was some serious load really. No matter, they paid their crackers well enough (even tho’ some of them are still waiting for their money).
That was getting so serious that Angels and Paradox only had very stuff left. So few that they BOTH died few months after we’ve joined Skid Row (I know they ain’t too proud of that period but if you carefully check it out, we’ve joined Skid Row around November 1990 and they died few months later).
AAhh … Skid Row. Many people seem to remember of SKid Row like if that was some golden stuff or I don’t know.Golden crap.
Reign of the stinky tricks, lies and bullshit. FFC, Metallica and Banditt could probably have written the book of the scene’s most crappy methods at that time.
Shall I mention a few ?
Yeah, they deserve it.Number 3 : Release the crap trick !
We’re working on game but there seems to be some competition out there. No problem.
FFC : "Crack is not finished but release it! Kein problem. Spread the word it is cracked and let’s spread the unachieved crack anyway. We’ll fix it later".
Fun eh? Decent crackers gave up the game or lost their motivation. FFC released not working games and then later started spreading the fix. +1 day lamers (our Skid Row fans, or shall i say customers?) didn’t see the trick since they had no access to fast 0 days warez U.S bbs’.
Number 2 : Steal the wares :
Ah .. I liked that one. Either FFC (lame cracker) or Banditt (phreaker) pretended that they were joining your group.
If you were stupid enough to believe this, then, they started stealing your originals off your private BBS’ or such.
In you xss.
Number 1 : Use the phone companies or cops
How about setting up an international phone conference and then charge a member of another competitive cracking group ? Sounds ugly eh ? Nah. It just sound Skid Row.
Not enough ? Make anonymous calls to another group’s hacker and threaten him to call the FBI.Ok, you got my point. After just a few months in there, when we found out how stinky some of the main members were … Guess what.
We left.And together with some other Skid Row members, we’ve started a group call "Sprint"
[hr]
SPRINT and the legendary LEMMINGS[hr]
On the paper, Sprint was a killer machine :
– Originals almost everywhere (France, UK, Germany, USA). Crackers, $$, hackers (cards, and already blue boxes), BBS’ …
– Affordable competition (pieces of Skid row, dead Angels, most of Paradox joined Quartex, …).But we’ve made two mistakes :
– Someone believed that FFC of Skid Row wanted to join us (remember the ugly Skid Row tricks, lol) ;
– I was getting big headed and no one was really controlling this.So what happened. After a couple weeks, we’ve started getting a few originals but all seemed to go wrong. For instance, i was first to get the game "Turrican II" and sent it to Gaston (Sweden, yes one of our crackers).
The day after he told me that after some intensive tests, the crack worked but the end sequence was missing. Since Gaston wasn’t some sort of FFC, he refused to release an not working game (hi Gaston!). I blamed him for this (Skid Row’s school) and we’ve lost him.Ofcourse, getting another game to crack took long enough to get beaten by another group. We’ve missed Turrican II.
In the mean time, some other suppliers sent two game too FFC.
Guess what.They went released by SKid Row … strange eh?
And I was warning my team mates who seemed to still trust FFC.Short after, oh damn I caught the exclusive game "LEMMINGS".
Lemmings was one of these games you want to crack. Some sort of legendary games that breaks into history. You know for sure that your crack intro, attached to this game, would be seen thousands if not millions times all over the world.
What you need is :
– An intro (ok) ;
– The game, fast if not first (we were not only first but alone for hours if not days) ;
– A decent cracker … hrm
Now, I was prolly one of the first person to get the package in my hands. Excited, I was calling around to get a hold of a cracker. But no one was picking up up phone and because of me, we’ve lost Gaston.
But we still one had one available cracker … FFC."Give it to FFC" they said. "You can trust that guy". And me, excited and stupid enough, i sent the game to him.
You know the rest. Skid Row cracked our "LEMMINGS". They couldn’t release the doc since i had the original in my hands. Doc in my hands and huge stuff in my butt.
And then I went nut. Really nut.
Next chapter : "Loneliness and bankruptcy"
Subzero :
ya that TRUE… paralamia paid UNIT A for every single CRACK…world of wonders even The Company did pay to get games Cracked… YOU KNOW THAT BRAINWALKER (der j?rgen…gelle)!. THATS A SURE THING!…… they even wanted to pay me alot of bucks to get the originals early enuff…. since they tried and tried to have them that early as i had…!… but the did not had ANY chance!…. execept a few games ….right Brainwalker!?Lol. Grow up.
As long as I am not paying for sex or friends, it is all fine to me.Foxy / The Company
musashi9 :
very interesting stuff
do you still know any of the old amiga crackers?I am afraid I don’t have any old amiga crackers left on my buddy’s list. But if I can help you getting in touch with some of them, i’ll try my best.
musashi9 :
@musashi9
thats a nice idea! foxy could be the first participant for the projectMy pleasure
scenex :
i really respect the big coders and crackers from the early days.. i mean there was no internet to just download quickly a tutorial about whatever you like.
let’s say these days, you’d like to learn how safedisc/manualunpacking/keygenning/whatever works – no problem after 3 minutes searching you got at least 10 tuts explaining the topic. then you just need to afford the time and et voila you understand it and you’re able to use your knowledge.Informations were rare and precious. Tools were not numerous and oftenly home made/weaked.
I rememner that one of our crackers made his own Action Replay thing. In fact it was suppoed to be released for a software company. Dunno how it ended up but, during the dev. phase they asked him to removed a feature : a Rob northern protection tracker.
It also had a scan feature for password protections.
It was far-west really …Slash : No, not this foxy. Had to change my nick after I got busted back in 1991.
And yeah, this Dominator http://www.thecompany2064.com
The UltraHle 2064 site is down tho’. And domain name is currently cybersquatted so I dunno what will be the next.
