Confess your sins

[Nostalgeek]

HAHA that's one great thread for sure!!!

Okay, time to confess my computer sins as well...

- Buying LD 3.5 floppies and cutting the corner to turn them into cheap HD floppies...how evil.

- Downloaded and used way too many cracks, trainers, warez/ISO's, MP3s', no-cd's...

- Stole coverdisks

- Stole a full gamebox once...god my knees would be shaking for at least 2 hours after that, I felt like I just bought my one-way ticket to hell.

- That's actually not a sin, but something really stupid I did. Thought it would be a wise idea to try and fix a non-working CPU ventilator myself, and try it on a brand new Athlon CPU I just bought from my hard-earned teenager bucks....turned the computer on, had a look on the screen waiting for the BIOS to show up, until I noticed a strange smell and discovered in pain that early Athlon's would melt down after a very few seconds with a non-working fan... I'll remember that smell forever I was so crying in despair that it broke my mum's heart and she bought me a brand new one...mom, if you ever read this (lol) you fucking friggin' own.

- There was this local video rental store that also rented SNES, Genesis and PC Games that was run by a woman that knew my mom (hi again mom), so she actually let me pick games for free, one at a time.. She probably always thought I had very difficult tastes in games, as I could come every 2 hours to get a new one, sometimes 5 or 6 times a day. What she didn't know is that I copied every single of them...just like all the movie tapes I rented actually.

- My parents, for space reasons, decided to put the PC in my room, and I was perfectly fine with it they protected it with a BIOS password, and I was only allowed to play 2 hours on weekends, if the weather was bad, and sometimes as a special gift during the week. But I wasn't allowed to play violent games at all. Of course, as a smart young kid, I thought that it was very likely that computer shops had generic BIOS passwords based on brand and model so they could fix computers that are brought to them without caring about passwords or clearing CMOS. And to my great joy, I was right opened the computer, took the reference, went to that shop, told them a story about the computer being locked with a password that was forgotten, and that I wanted another way than clearing the CMOS when possible...they were pretty amazed by the young kid I was, and left a few minutes after with the generic password \o/ omg I felt like Mister Universe that day. I celebrated it by pretending going to sleep, then having a night of Wolfenstein 3D on a weekday lol. And then many other nights of pure gaming in secret. My parents NEVER figured it out. And then one day they told me "you're good at computers, it's probably gonna be your job later, you're now old enough to manage your own time by yourself - we're gonna remove the password." I was like "oh? ok...sounds cool". Took me a few weeks to actually confess the truth to them but we all had - and still have sometimes - a great laugh about it


Hehe, that's all I can think of for now!

[Avanze]

I admit to owning a lot of pirated games for both the Amiga, and for the Atari ST. I even had one of those pirate disk drive things for the SNES too. Boy, did I have a good connection back in the day.

[BippyM]

I confess to changing 2 posts to help members here onto the path of righteousness

heheheheh shame retro quickly changed his back hahahaha

[Nostalgeek]

Rofl bippy :P

[Big-Byte]

My mate had a lot of pirate discs that he kept in nice alphabetical order in the outer boxes that batches of 500 bulk blank discs came in.

One day I was returning one of these boxes to my mates house one cold snowy winter. As I walked up the garden path with Mort I must of slipped or something because suddenly the box was upside down flying through the air with all 500 discs now in a pile mixed up with the mud/snow on his garden lawn.

My mate opened the front door and Mort and I spent the next 5 minutes manically picking up discs and throwing them into his hallway while hysterical with laughter.

Never was allowed to any more discs. they were always copied for me after that.

[Smiley]

• Pirating since I was aged 4 up until this day.
• Sold an A2000 mobo with CIA chips upside down.
• Helped run an IRC chan that crudely cracked Bioshock.
• Killing 2 PSX units installing a modchip

[AmigaFriend]

Originally Posted by Big-Byte

My mate opened the front door and Mort and I spent the next 5 minutes manically picking up discs and throwing them into his hallway while hysterical with laughter.

Dude what a

[Smiley]

Originally Posted by laser

2 I mistreated some young girlfriends when I was adolescent.. even right now I do that (I can't control that)

[Photon]

In my first group, I ganged up with a group member and had our swapper kicked out of our group for not learning to code fast enough. Silly! My first and only act of mobbing, if 2 ppl counts as a mob.

...but he was a LAMER! And I had just recently found out what a lamer was.

He was very sad. I have no excuse except that I was 16.

[gimbal]

You guys are all way more cool (in a geeky way) than me. The only thing I can think of is pirating games. About 95% of my collection was pirated. I still paid for the games though, at about 1.5 dollars (converted from the old Dutch currency before the euro) per disk If disks of my own could be reused, it was half price.

Pretty sweet deal back then, I could get almost any game and the guy even tested every single one to see if they worked.

[NewDeli]

Speaking of buying software, I started to license a few of my favorite apps via Paypal (well, except Windows itself). So now, 99% of my whole collection comes from p2p, not 100% !

For example, I licensed the software that makes my old scanner functionning under Vista, and PowerCinema, the only player (from Cyberlink) that could get my Hauppauge TV card to work.

Also, I try to get the people I help with their computers to buy a few software too (and that includes Windows ).
Fair enough ?

[Nostalgeek]

Haha Deleauvive, yeah that's fair enough I guess! Well I must admit that since I'm older and have a job, I decided to buy legit Windows licenses. Actually 3 of them: 2 XP's and 1 Vista, as a payback for the illegal copies I used/made/distributed of my DOS/Win3.1/Win95/WinNT4/Win2K/WinXP around me think we both deserve a medal of some kind

Ugh, er, i paid for my first vic20 by distributing leaflets, 10000 of them in fact. Except I discovered where the owner lived and delivered maybe 200 round his home address then burnt the rest on a bonfire. He kept thanking me because all his friends had gotten their leaflet and his new business seemed to go well...
For amiga sins, everyone had pirated software, even the dogooder geeks with the big thick plastic glasses. However I learnt about tone dialing, and how to configure a modem to redial after the 20mins hangup automatically. Which leads one into the shady ground of learning all about x25 and systemX... We wont go into mastercard gold reverse call territory (mostly because although occasionally present when it was being done, i drew the line at doing it myself at home, i was curious not bloody stupid!) and other fun things you bump into on bbs's...
When the playstation1 first came out, I quickly learnt how to modchip it and i realised they increased in value when chipped quite a lot, so sold my first one on with some games but backed them up first. The interest in it with all the games was so strong I used to buy a ps1, mod it, copy all my games for it and sell it chipped with a increasing number of games each time. I used to do this when paying the phone bill or rent was due or I needed food. Although I did buy a motorbike with one of the sale proceeds. Eventually I built a linux box and hooked up 4 scsi external cd burners to cut down on time taken. I sold the lot when one day some kids knocked on the door to buy games as they had heared I did it, burning some cd's for your mates is one thing but I didnt want to get back into getting raided by FAST territory. The guy who bought my setup had me build 4 more like it and went on to knock out about £10k a month of pirate games, or so the papers reported his income at when he got arrested for it...

[AmigaFriend]

Mr Fluffy, nice story. One step ahead of competition, and the police for that matter.

Originally Posted by Leffmann

Speaking of sins I also recall one of their A3000's or A4000's had some impressive graphical demo running with ASM-One and accompanying source code in the background. I changed some numbers and stuff, reassembled and wrote the executable back, and obviously the demo crashed. In a lame attempt to not seem conspicuous I told one of the employees something like "that one's not working anymore" and pointed to the Amiga, and left.

We used to go to our local dixons/lewis's and other big chain stores selling amiga's and upload one of our demo's onto it and hang round watching people's faces.
Once they tried to threaten us with the police for interfereing with the display computers on camera, except at that point someone walked past us and bought one of the amigas on the strength of what he seen, telling the counter clerk that he hadn't realized it was that advanced and what a great display that was. We had to surrender our disc to the salesman and leave at that point. We offered to code them a version with their own bespoke logo's on for a fee but that went down like a lead balloon
Somehow this doesnt count as a sin ...

[Ziaxx]

I'm pretty sure most people copied games back in the days, especially the younger users who were still in school. Older people with a steady income might have bought more originals, but that's another story.

Anyway, my sin is that although I'm a loyal Amiga dude, I've always been curious to try an Atari ST just to see how they are compared to the Amiga. Now that's a sin if anything, but I'm innocent as I haven't actually done it, just thought of it. But it's sinful thinking nevertheless!

[DH]

Originally Posted by Ziaxx

I'm pretty sure most people copied games back in the days, especially the younger users who were still in school. Older people with a steady income might have bought more originals

Sorry to bust that bubble but in the old days the older folk were just as handy at copying and illegally distributing games as much as the young schoolies

Did I ever buy a game legally ..............................nope, I don't think I actually bought any game except when I bought the A500 package and A1200 package

My first Amiga was bought in 1988-ish when I was working my guts out in an Electronics firm, I was 21 then, and you wouldn't believe how much Amiga related disks were floating around throughout the company. I would say more than the schools but I can't speak for them. You could almost get everything and anything you wanted, not that I did this

Of course, I am now a much wiser and law abiding git, and I support everything by buying it *cough*

[Paul_s]

I once banged my Amiga 1200 keyboard with my fist. I hit it so hard the entire thing jumped up

It's crime : It gurued on a game

Never abused my 500's though

[danwood]

I suppose im rare in saying this but i have NEVER pirated a game and i have been playing computer games from acorn electron/spectrum forwards. I know a lot of people who pirate pc games and their computers are so full of viruses that they end up having to wipe their pc 4/5 times a year. I have had my laptop for 500 days and i have never had to reinstall windows and have never had a virus problem.

[DH]

Originally Posted by danwood

I have had my laptop for 500 days and i have never had to reinstall windows and have never had a virus problem.

I have never had to wipe a hard drive and reinstall any OS, the only time I have had to do anything of he sort is when I've upgraded to a newer version. btw. I've been using PC's since Windows 3.1, way back in time mate

I only ever caught a virus once on the Amiga and that was through an ageing old man who new jack all about anything + he had no virus programs on his Amiga. So me and my work colleagues decided to get our own back. There was a disk, just can't remember what it was called or even what it was, but if you could answer 4 - 6 questions (demo scene related I think) you would get to a secret part which allowed you to choose a virus, from many different kinds, to put on the boot block of a floppy. So one night I thought very hard about each question, then answered them and bingo I was in on my second or third try. The next day we all grouped together to see which disks we could pass to him that we could attach the viruses to, haha.

I think, all in all, we gave him around 20 disks and he never suspected anything. He only ever got a bit concerned when everyone refused to accept any disks from him, poor bugger. He never did find out. I've seen him recently and he's still non the wiser, I just can't bring myself to telling him but it did make me laugh