Re: SAM

[dastar@crl.com (Sam Ismail)]

Dave Althoff (dalloff@freenet.columbus.oh.us) wrote:

: (In my high school, the big trick was to write password programs...in
: BASIC.  Which I would routinely crack by hanging on ^C during boot, or by
: booting another disk thus gaining full access anyway.  Then I wrote my
: own:  hacked up a "boot message" program so that the password request
: interrupted the boot process.  Then I moved the directory to Track $04 so
: that the other major crack method also failed.  Of course, that was just a
: demo project, but everyone else wondered what I had done that I could
: crack their disks but they couldn't crack mine...  8-) )

Heheh.  Starting to bring back memories.

I remember games were frowned upon (as I'm sure they were at everyone
else's school) so I used my talents to create magic disks with hidden
games on them for my friends.  I created an alternate catalog track
on the disk and stored a few games there (such as Moon Patrol, Ms. Pacman
etc) and then marked the sectors the games took up as used in the 
track $11 catalog (so they wouldn't be over-written by the programs on
the real catalog).  Then I changed one of the rarely used DOS 3.3 commands
(can't remember which one) to "GAMES".  I then pointed this command to
some machine code that would load a program that was stored in a hidden
file on the disk.  This program would ask for a password, and if the
right password was entered, it would change the catalog track in DOS
to the hidden track and then run an auto-loader (my friends didn't know
how to run binary files).


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Computer Historian, Programmer, Musician, Philosopher, Athlete, Writer, Jackass