Author Archives: gotpapers

Honey/1001 Collection Pt. 2

After presenting you the first batch from the Honey/1001 Crew collection a while ago, here is the second instalment. The letters stem from the period between 1986 and 1987, when many of the C64 crackers and groups that later should become legendary were in their infancy, yet Honey was already a star due to his legendary stunt of breaking the screen border and the subsequent media attention.

• Col B. (UK) to Honey, ~1987 [metadata]
• Hacker/Future Projects 20550 (Netherlands) to Honey, 9 March 1987 [metadata]
• Heiko/Yeti Factories (Germany) to Honey, 11 March 1987 [metadata]
• Irata/Flash Cracking Group (Germany) to Honey, ~1986 [metadata]
• Irata/Red Sector Inc. (Germany) to Honey, ~1987 [metadata]
• Irata/Flash Cracking Group (Germany) to Steve/1001, 19 August 1986 [metadata]
• Mr. Pinge/Relax (Sweden) to Honey, July 1987 [metadata]
• Mr. Pinge/Relax (Sweden) to Honey, between April and July 1987 [metadata]
• PCW/The Lightforce (Germany) to Honey, 8 July 1987 [metadata]
• Skylab & General Zoff/New Balance Bochum (Germany) to Honey, 25 July 1986 [metadata]
• The Mercenary Cracker (Netherlands) to Honey, after 7 May 1986 [Letter removed per author’s request, 30.10.2019]
• Yip/Purebyte (Finland) to Honey, 3 June 1986 [metadata]
• Yip/Purebyte (Finland) to Honey, 5 November 1986 [metadata]

Scene-Related Software Manuals

It’s no secret that crackers and demoscene coders produced their own tools – not just for internal purposes, but also for others to use, and even to buy. Today we bring you a selection of scene-related manuals that reached us during the past months.

Card Cruncher 3.0 (1987)

Card Cruncher, 1001 Crew’s legendary packer software, was already described in detail here. Honey, one of the authors, provided us with the original manual. If you got to see it back in 1987, you could consider yourself very lucky – as can be seen on the second page, only Robin/Dynamic Duo and Fax/New Stars were allowed to use the program apart from 1001 Crew. Now, 29 years later, you can read it. Get the high quality scans and the metadata sheet here.

TCB Tracker 1.0 (1990)

The TCB Tracker was a music software for the Atari ST written by An Cool of the Swedish Atari demogroup The Carebears. It was sold by MPH, a nowadays defunct software company from Norwich/UK. Robin B. provided us with a scan of the manual, and then we went on to ask An Cool whether we may put it online. Luckily, he is fine with it, so you can enjoy it 26 years after the program hit the stores. Get the full scan and the metadata sheet here.

Demo Designer (1988)

Demo Designer was one of the numerous commercially available “demomakers” in the late 1980s, which allowed less-skilled computer users to create their own demos and intros. A number of sceners were able to make some money by developing such software – most famously TCC Design, a subgroup of Red Sector Inc., who programmed the famous Data Becker DemoMaker for the Amiga. Demo Designer, a less-known C64 demomaker, was sold by Digital Marketing, a PD distributor and occasional software publisher run by entrepreneur Dieter Mückter and cracker/coder MWS/Radwar. Due to the latter’s vast network of scene contacts, the commercial software published by Digital Marketing was very often programmed by sceners. Demo Designer was coded by Joachim Fräder/X-Ample, it used music routines and tunes by F.A.M.E. and Maniacs of Noise, and, last not least, MWS himself was responsible for the copy protection. This copy of the manual, alongside the program disk, was sent by MWS as a preview to The Movers, who kindly provided this scan. Get the high quality scans and the metadata sheet here.

Floppy Disk VC 1541 manual

This is not a scene-produced manual, but one that many C64 sceners had studied at length. When I visited Jeff Smart, the legendary editor of Illegal, for an interview last year, he gave me this 1541 floppy drive manual as the only scene-related thing that he still had in his possession. He got it in 1985, when he was still fairly new to the C64, and scribbled funny/weird stuff over some of its pages. Get the full scan and the metadata sheet here.

Swedish 1980s C64 Stuff

Today, we give you some stickers, disk covers, and paper notes which hedning managed to secure from the collection of Zeta, a cracker, coder and musician who was active in the Swedish C64 scene in the late 1980s. Some well-known and some less-known names from the Scandinavian and international scene. Enjoy!

Disk covers:
• 2000 Volt disk cover, 1988 [metadata]
• Four Danish Dream Line disk covers, 1988 [metadata cover 1, 2, 3, 4]
• Digital Crackers disk cover, 1988 [metadata]
• Flash disk cover, 1988 [metadata]
• Gilbert Turbo Cracker disk cover, 1988 [metadata]
• M.U.S.I.C. disk cover, 1988 [metadata]
• The Digital Force disk cover, 1988 [metadata]

Stickers:
• Spemu/Finnish Gold sticker, 1980s [metadata]
• Zargon sticker, 1980s [metadata]

Letters:
• Creator/Strike Force (Germany) to Zeta, 1988 [metadata]
• Euratom (Germany) to Zeta, 1987 [metadata]
• Mr Lead/CPU (Sweden) to Zeta, 20 May 1988 [metadata]
• Mr Lead/CPU (Sweden) to Zeta, 9 June 1988 [metadata]
• Mr Lead/CPU (Sweden) to Zeta, 4 July 1988 [metadata]
• Nrj/New Aces (France) to Zeta, 1988 [metadata]
• Spirit/2000 Volt (Sweden) to Zeta, 1988 [metadata]

Vacation Special

Now that the summer holidays are beginning, here are some examples of a rather forgotten genre of swapletters – tourist postcards! 1980s’ sceners were mostly teenagers, so, besides chasing up originals to crack, doing fascinating things with computers, and travelling to the occasional copyparty, they also attended school, had arguments with their parents, and, of course, went on vacation. The fascinating samples provided by Honey, Skylab, and Lynx show that they did so with mixed feelings: One the one hand, they enjoyed the holidays, but on the one hand, they were anxious about missing out on latest scene news. So, even in such a fascinating place as Leningrad in 1988, one scener was more concerned with ongoing C64 game projects at home than with the perestroika mood around him. Another common trait was the fascination of teenage sceners with half-naked women – so keep in mind that some of the images are rather NSFW. But most importantly, these postcards testify to the strong sense of friendship within the scene: Despite the fierce competition, the protagonists found time to simply send regards to their contacts around the world, whereever they went.

This update includes following postcards:
• AVH/Radwar (Germany) to Honey/1001 (Netherlands), 19 April 1987, sent from London [metadata]
• Breeze/Antic (Australia) to Lynx/Hitmen (Germany), 26 December 1991, sent from the Maldives [metadata]
• Drago/The Movers (Germany) to Honey, ~1987, sent from Loutraki/Greece [metadata]
• Frankie/OGM (Germany) to Honey, 8 August 1987, sent from Barcelona [metadata]
• Frankie/OGM to Skylab/The Movers (Germany), August 1987, sent from Barcelona [metadata]
• Ixion/Triad (Sweden) to Honey, 19 June 1987, sent from Liverpool [metadata]
• Matcham/Network (Norway) to Honey, 14 August 1988, sent from Leningrad [metadata]
• Mega (?) to Lynx, 23 July 1991, sent from Riviera Romagnola/Italy [metadata]
• Sodan (Denmark) to Honey, 23 June 1987, sent from Ibiza [metadata]
• Strider/Fairlight (Sweden) to Honey, 19 June 1987, sent from Kassandria/Greece [metadata]
• unknown member of Radwar to Honey, 24 March 1988, sent from Dénia/Spain [metadata]