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Desktops (Apple) Apple Games

It Took 33 Years To Find the Easter Egg In This Apple II Game (vice.com) 97

Posted by EditorDavid from the what-took-you-so-long dept.
Jason Koebler writes: Gumball, a game released in 1983 for the Apple II and other early PCs, was never all that popular. For 33 years, it held a secret that was discovered this week by anonymous crackers who not only hacked their way through advanced copyright protection, but also became the first people to discover an Easter Egg hidden by the game's creator, Robert A. Cook. Best of all? Cook congratulated them Friday for their work.
The article attributes the discovery to a game-cracker named 4am, who's spent years cracking the DRM on old Apple II games to upload them to the Internet Archive. "Because almost all of the games are completely out of print, all-but-impossible to find, and run only on old computers, 4am is looked at as more of a game preservation hero than a pirate."
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It Took 33 Years To Find the Easter Egg In This Apple II Game More

It Took 33 Years To Find the Easter Egg In This Apple II Game

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  • TIme flies (Score:3)

    by hcs_$reboot ( 1536101 ) on Sunday June 12, 2016 @02:44AM (#52298469)
    Played it briefly, and preferred Lode Runner (also from Brøderbund) ; and yes, I'm that old.

    • Broderbund! Wow, that brings back some memories...

    • My favorite Apple II games: Wizardry, Choplifter, Aztec, Karateka, Flight Simulator... ah, good times. I also learned how to program on an Apple II as well. It wasn't all time wasted. Good ole Applesoft BASIC. But ugh, line numbers... It was a while before I realized why I could never create programs that ran as fast as my commercial games.

      These days, I write commercial games in C++. I may not have become a videogame programmer were it not for my Apple II. I guess I'm just as old.

      • My favorite Apple II games: Wizardry, Choplifter, Aztec, Karateka, Flight Simulator... ah, good times. I also learned how to program on an Apple II as well. It wasn't all time wasted. Good ole Applesoft BASIC. But ugh, line numbers... It was a while before I realized why I could never create programs that ran as fast as my commercial games.

        These days, I write commercial games in C++. I may not have become a videogame programmer were it not for my Apple II. I guess I'm just as old.

        I'd add Castle Wolfenstein, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Stellar Trek and Super Stellar Trek to the list.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rossdee ( 243626 )

        I bought an Apple ][ in 1981 - it was my 3rd computer

        I still think it was the best of the 8 bit machines. Although the C=64 had better graphics, the Apple was more expandable and had faster I/O

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by antdude ( 79039 )

        I played Choplifter (Lode Runners to rescue, hehe), Karateka (bah to that remake), Aztec (so many keys and easy to cheat!), Gemstone Warrior, Nibbler, Bilestoad, Diamond Mines, Conan the Barbian, Bruce Lee, RoboCop (ew), Gauntlet (ew), Montezuma's Revenge, Oregon Trail (duh!), Lemonade, etc.

        10 HOME
        20 PRINT "HELLO!"
        30 GOTO 10
        RUN ;) You forgot Logo!!

        BTW, you can (re)play these old Apple 2 games on http://virtualapple.org/ [virtualapple.org] ...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I played that game all the way through on an Atari 800 XL back then.
      The game was real fun, like most of the Brøderbund games.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by brettw ( 27391 )

      I played Gumball quite a bit during grade school. Loderunner I played to death on the original mac, didn't care as much for the Apple II version.

      But seriously if Slashdot starts doing clickbait garbage headlines like this, I'll probably be done. And I've been here for a very long time.

      • But seriously if Slashdot starts doing clickbait garbage headlines like this, I'll probably be done. And I've been here for a very long time.

        I was more annoyed by the "new" delayed banners right side (that appear right at the time the mouse reached the area to click on replies). Thanks to a few AdBlock+ rules, not annoyed anymore, for now.

    • I was a Lode Runner fan myself. It's what led me to create http://treasurechaser.enigmadr... [enigmadream.com]
      • Nice! You probably did all the Lode Runner Championship levels...
      • Like the original, this one also includes a level editor, and the whole level can be embedded in the URL. I made this one this morning: http://treasurechaser.enigmadr... [enigmadream.com]
        • Amazing, really! Just one think, in the original game the "villains" were running slower than the guy... (~2/3)
          • Wow, I totally forgot about that; no wonder mine seems rather difficult sometimes! Wonder how easily I can fix that...
            • And since you're at it, when a "villain" falls into a hole (dug) he stops and remains in the hole, even if there is an empty space below (he doesn't keep falling ;-)
          • Unfortunately, this is not a simple fix because some of the logic was assuming that the tile size was a multiple of the movement speed. Breaking that assumption causes the enemies to be able to, for example, walk over a gap which they were supposed to fall into. The player's movement speed is 4 pixels per frame and changing the enemies' movement speed to 3 causes problems. I could make the enemy movement speed 2 and that'd probably work. In case I don't get around to a proper fix, do you think the game woul
          • I updated the game so the enemies move slower. Instead of changing how far they move each frame, I simply skipped an update of each enemy sprite once every fourth frame.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          Here's a fun one [enigmadream.com]....

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dgatwood ( 11270 )

            FYI, I ran into a bug in the game where the level code it generates is just "1KE0F".

            I URL-encoded the localStorage object's save1 value and saved it here [gatwood.net] in case you want to debug it. :-)

            • Strange, I didn't have any problem getting the level code out of it. Must have been some other timing or state glitch and not a problem with the actual encoding. Your level link is this URL [enigmadream.com]

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by dgatwood ( 11270 )

                Thanks.

                No idea. I won it several times, and it kept giving me that truncated code. This was on Safari 9.1 (OS X v10.9), for whatever that's worth.

                I also noticed that if I go to one of the custom levels, play through it, then start playing normally (without reloading it without the extra fragment identifier), I get to the end of the first level, reach the top of the ladder, and get stuck. The problems might be related (but probably not).

                • In case you're up to fiddling with this project yourself, the source code (in a more manageable format usable with Scrolling Game Development Kit 2 [sf.net]) is available at https://bitbucket.org/bluemonk... [bitbucket.org]. I'm not sure I have the motivation to maintain it much any more myself. Unfortunately, Scrolling Game Development Kit 2 requires Windows, so you wouldn't be able to use that from OS X. I tried porting SGDK2 to other platforms (namely Linux) once long ago, but there was some difference in the way the Microsoft i
                • I fixed some bugs relating to the player getting stuck in the top left corner and other behaviors when playing an edited level loaded from the URL. Hopefully that resolves the problems mentioned in your most recent post.
          • Would you like this included in the custom level list? If so, with what names for the level and author?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by neoRUR ( 674398 )
      Your not old, your of a generation, me included, where something special happened that most people didn't even know about or understand. I spent a summer working at Target during High School so I could make enough money to buy an Apple ][+. You were probably like me where you saw this thing, this technology, these games, and the world changed and you just had to have one. I had dabbled in electronics when I was a younger kid, and would stand in the sears store in awe waiting for my turn in the sea of kids p

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      Ditto. I made my own levels and even finished Championship Lode Runner (had to buy its hints book!), and got a paper certificate (should had kept it -- did you/anyone keep a copy). This was when I was in (six/)th grade.

      • Actually tried to win LRC without cheating/hacking but it happened to be too hard for me! (Didn't have this book either) Don't remember exactly what was my last level, but I recall the whole LRC was very well made, and a lot of fun!

    • If you LR fans didn't know about it from a few years ago (September 7th, 2014).

  • Feedback: Better Story Title (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsmith-mac ( 639075 ) on Sunday June 12, 2016 @03:07AM (#52298511)

    I know the editors are just shortening the title from TFA, but saying "this Apple II game" rather than the name of the game borders on clickbait. If you're going to rewrite the title (and you should, that's what a good editor does), then you may as well do it right and make it a properly descriptive title.

    e.g. "Easter Egg Found After 33 Years in Apple II Game 'Gumball'" which is more descriptive and more space efficient, coming in at 3 characters shorter than the current Slashdot title.

  • "In This Apple Game!" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Sunday June 12, 2016 @04:53AM (#52298647)

    You won't believe the name of the game, or what Tim Cook did next!

    Was EditorDavid hired from Facebook? Clickbait is like newspeak with cancer.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Why do I get the feeling " EditorDavid"'s real name isn't David? rather Ganesh

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tomhath ( 637240 )
      Took me a minute to realize that "Cook" referred to the game's creator, Robert A. Cook, not Tim Cook. But as clickbait they should've worked both in somehow.

      • Took me a minute to realize that "Cook" referred to the game's creator, Robert A. Cook, not Tim Cook. But as clickbait they should've worked both in somehow.

        Well shit that just makes it so much worse.

  • ...it is a rotten easter egg!
  • This copyright protection is 33 years old. Should we really be calling it "advanced"?
    • If you read the article, and the linked narrative by 4a.m. (the person who actually figured out the copy protection), it was not an elementary procedure to rip the data from the disk for the Internet Archive upload. The disk is unreadable by nearly all utilities available for the Apple II, and incompatible with modern disk drive systems, which expect very specific disk formatting and file structures. Security through obscurity and antiquity... I congratulate 4a.m. on a very impressive rip - I'm glad peopl

  • Copy protection back then was really in its golden age. Off the top of my head I can remember a couple of different schemes:

    1. manipulating the on-disk structures so that certain things couldn't be read. If you did a bit-for-bit copy (via locksimith etc) you wouldn't get a read error for that sector, which meant you were running a pirate copy.

    2. manipulating the track layout so the drive could read the track, but a bit copier couldn't. I'm not sure how they did that, really. Did they write half a track and

    • There were three tools that everyone used to use:

      1. locksmith, AFAIK the first bit-for-bit copier
      2. crackshot, which would dump your ram to storage. You could reload it into its running state

      There was one more good bit copier, who's name I've forgotten. Oh, Back-it-Up.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      • Never heard about 'crackshot', to bad.
        That is technology in our days every program should have ... so were the times.

    • Well, at that time all the data from the floppy disk was read by the OS.
      In other words, there was no command to the disk controller to read or write to track 11/sector 5.
      The OS had to step the disk reading arm to track 11 and start reading ... with special "SECTOR START" markers it would recognize: here starts a sector. And after the "SECTOR START" would be the sector number.
      As it took so long to react on that sectors would not be organized on a track in a consecutive manner but like 1 3 2 4 5 7 ... I forgo

  • You know, I think looking at this that it's a little easy to say it was discovered now.
    Who's to say it wasn't discovered by people playing back when it was published?
    Let's face it, it's not like records of the period are detailed. I can imagine folks posting about it on their local BBS which in turn would get lost over time.

  • I already discovered it 30 years ago ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Sunday June 12, 2016 @01:17PM (#52300163)

    I had a "cracked" copy of Gumball back in the middle 80's. I would regularly use Copy ][+'s Sector Editor to scan for messages that pirates would leave behind. I never mentioned it because I thought someone had already discovered it.

    i.e. "The Fly" left a message in Mario Bros.

    BLOAD MARIO BROS
    CALL-151
    803G

    The reason this works is because the normal entry point is $0800 which is a JMP instruction. The next instruction starts the hidden message left behind.

    For Gumball, the hints are triggered via Ctrl-Z during the intermission.
    Every Apple 2 game reads the keyboard via:

    AD 00 C0 LDA $C000

    It is trivial to search memory for these 3 bytes and see what keypresses the games respond to.

    The hard part was to figure out what triggered _that_ hint. Fortunately you can scan memory for the joystick button 0 and joystick button 1 presses.

    . /sarcasm Anyways, who knew using a sector editor counts as news these days.

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