first amiga game with a virus

ok..i need help for all you amiga experts..cuz i can't figure this out myself....

my friend placed a bet that i could not answer this question..."what was the first amiga game with a virus?" I think his question might mean that exactly..the first ever with a virus..or the first game he had witha virus...regardless, i can not figure it out!!! can someone please give me some suggestions and titles..or anyting..i'm cluelessss....Thank you so much...

[Big-Byte]

Archipegalos? I think I spelt that right..
going off to have a look for the correct spelling...

hey thanks for your input..but that's not the answer( any other suggestions? thank you so much

[fiath]

Virus? (1988)

Seriously though, I am not aware of any Amiga games that were released *infected* with a virus, at least I have never heard of any, but this does not mean there wasn't. Perhaps it was just the first one you friend had... In which case, I guess we can't help you.

I think a game released infected with a virus is rather unlikely, but if it did happen - I think it would probably have been well publicised!

[RetroMan]

I think the better question would be, WHICH was the first Amiga Virus ever One of the real early ones (I don´t think it was the first, but it was the one I had back then) was the SCA Virus ....

http://home4.inet.tele.dk/vht-dk/amiga/desc/txt/sca.htm

It´s from 1987 so there had to be some earlier ones ....

[woody57]

...... It might be obtuse but the first named after a virus NOT Bacteria eg Red Death , unintensional , definitley wrong but get my drift !

[Amiga1992]

Who the fuck would know? As Fiath said a game spread with a virus on it is unlikely.

I say your friend speaks bollocks. ;D

ok thanks for the replies..yah i think he may have meant the first amiga game that he has with a virus. So have you guys had any games with a virus on it for yourselves? Thanks

[fisken uno]

It seems to me that your friend has been sniffing too much methane... BTW I would never agree on such a stupid bet... He seems to be like one of those who like to change the rules DURING the game. How the phuck could anyone else than himself know which was his first infected game? Braaak.

Yes, viruses was an annoying problem for me back in the day, but I had myself to blame cause I copied disks from the right and the left and everything inbetween. I find it extremely difficult to believe that any game could have been published infected... If so, the company must have been a really crappy one filled with morons not having a clue about anything. Or just plain wicked. Maybe they thought they were spreading skynet. MWAHAHA.

Yep,

Take this from an amiga oldtimer...there was a game that was released with a virus on it (unintentionally ofcourse) and I do remember reading about it in Amigaworld magazine and several BBS boards back in the day..but the actual name escapes me...sorry...

Wintermute

[fiath]

I don't believe it.

Shame you don't remember the name... Was it a "classic" game, or a more recent one? (on CD perhaps)

[Chuckles]

I actually DID buy one game which had a virus on the original disk when I got it home, and that game was Feud. However since it was fairly common practice for games to be opened up in the shops so that the employees could check it out, I'm a lot more likely to believe that my original became infected in the store than that it was released with a virus. If any game ever WAS really released with a virus, I think that would be something that would have gotten enough bad publicity that somebody around here would remember it.

[fiath]

Agreed, on both counts. Especially as the version of Feud we have released certainly has no virus.

I did some work experience in a shop, and one of the things we used to do is play/demonstrate games on a display computer. Just open up the game bags stored behind the counter and load them up - and put them back when we finished.

All it takes is that computer to have been infected, as remember all disks (as far as I know) were distributed write-enabled!

If I remember rightly, I write-protected all disks I came across, even at that time when I was at school. However, I doubt this was a widespread practice.

[fiath]

Actually - that is another thing that gets my goat.

Why the hell could the disks not be distributed write-protected?? All they needed to do was to make/request the disks without the write protection tab present (like completely missing).

I am sure that the duplication machines didn't or could be programmed not to care.

Sheesh.

[Galahad/FLT]

dodgy goings on with games I can remember was with Quartex and Sqweek.

Someone from the duplicators gave Quartex a copy of the game, Quartex then substituted words for swear words, and then resubmitted the disk to the duplicators.

Over 10,000 copies were made before it was spotted in a random Quality Control check.

I can't remember the name of the game, but there was a game that removed the bootblock of the game disk if you tampered with the code, but certainly not a virus.


I think CU Amiga/Amiga Format accidentally had a virus on some PD game they gave away on one of their CD's.

As for duplicators, the write protection is irrelevant. They will write to a disk regardless of protection state of disk.

[Chuckles]

Well, it's been a bit more than 5 months since my one and only post to this particular thread, but with the help of the nice folks at CAPS, I've just gotten confirmation of something that I had come to suspect, and that is relevant to the topic of this thread. I thought it might be worth posting as a "historical footnote".

There was indeed at least one Amiga game released which was infected by a virus that was actually on the master disk. Version 1.0 of Jinxter was infected by the SCA virus, at least in early production runs. I don't know if this was the first (and possibly only) case of this happening, but it seems likely. The SCA virus is (I believe) the first known Amiga virus, so the awareness of viruses at the time it began spreading was essentially zero.

I happen to own an original copy of Jinxter that I bought around 1988 or 1989, and I discovered the virus on it years ago, putting a sticker on the disk to remind me that it was infected. In the process of looking through my originals recently for disks to dump for CAPS, I ran across that copy and was reminded of it. I also happened to see an unopened copy of Jinxter on eBay recently, and I picked that up since it seemed like a good opportunity to get an unaltered original. When I checked this new copy and found that it also had the SCA virus on it, I became suspicious.

Knowing that the folks at CAPS can determine whether any writes were done to a disk since it was mastered, I sent in a dump of my newest copy, along with an explanation of my suspicions. Kieron has now informed me that the dump clearly shows that the disk was infected already when it was mastered. Well, now we know that it has actually happened.

By the way, CAPS already has 2 different releases of Jinxter (versions 1.0 and 1.2), and neither of those releases is infected. It seems that the virus must have been discovered and eliminated after a small number of production runs. So if you have a copy of the CAPS release, you don't have to worry about that copy being infected.

[fiath]

Chuckles: If you still have that copy of Feud, perhaps we should check that too...

Actually, we recently found another game with a virus - a particular version of Fruit Machine Simulator. We think it may actually only be activated when the copylock check fails (!!), but we have not been bothered to verify that. This is not the version of the game that is released of course

Note to all: Remeber, we are talking about games *mastered* with a virus here, something that, though now proven to have happened, is extreamly rare. A game infected with a virus after mastering obviously means it is modified, and thus excluded in the first stage of the "CAPS release process" (tm).

We can't completely lock out the possibility of viruses being on some DOS game, especially from very low profile releases with zero quality control. But you could argue that if the game was sold like that...

If we do find a virus, it is held back. So far only Fruit Machine.

At least 80% of the games released so far are not DOS. Therefore, the only thing a virus can do to those is render them unbootable. This is probably easy to see by the makers of the game.

Obviously this is a serious issue with the good ole ADF, as it is writeable by default (whereas IPF is a read-only format), and it is used mainly for DOS cracks - a hotbed for virii.

So I guess the only games *completely verified* to have been mastered with a virus so far is:

o Jinxter (only some (US?) copies of v1.0)
o Fruit Machine Simulator (version with title screen)

All these games also have non-infected versions.

Oh, and please don't start submitting your virus infected originals.

[Chuckles]

Originally posted by fiath
Chuckles: If you still have that copy of Feud, perhaps we should check that too...

I do still have the original, but you're not going to want a copy of it, I'm afraid. Oddly enough, my copy actually came with 2 copies of the same original disk, and both copies were infected. Neither copy worked properly, with lots of graphics glitches. I thought at the time that they had been infected in the store, and I simply acquired a cracked copy of the game and wrote over the originals. It took me a while to dig out both of those disks to confirm that I hadn't left one of them unchanged, but it turns out that I didn't. Since I was sure at the time that the originals had been damaged, there didn't seem to be any reason then to leave them as they were. Oops!

[Marcuz]

are there news on the issue? i find it very interesting... Feud etc.

[Shoonay]

Back in the old days, i remember playin' very much in "Wings". One day i get back form school, put my favorite game in the floppy drive, and... nothing happens...
I've checked the disk with an anti-virii, and there he was: "Lamer Exterminator" that was hidin' so much time on my floppy disk, came and "ate" everything