Best cracking group

[Codetapper]

If you look at the top of the startup-sequences:

Final Fight
; -===========-
; © 1991 U.S. Gold
;
; Written for Creative Materials by Richard Aplin
; (Started 10th January 1991)
;
;Ok. Remember Line Of Fire? Here we go again, crackers! Fill in the blanks:

The game first runs the file "Final" which takes over the operating system and loads the game. Hence AmigaDos is dead, "Final" isn't run as a background process so none of the other text appears. Echo and Type are also not on the disk so it would just say "not found" for OS1.3 etc even if it did get past it (which it can't)

ah. I didn't even see the game being run

There's your answer Samurai

[7-Zark-7]

Amigaboy just a thought about the piracy issue.
I don't mean this to necessarily condone the piracy or start a debate.
But if it wasn't for the cracking of certain titles, we would have never seen their release at all.
Example 1-Great Giana Sisters. A backdown against the bully Nintendo tatics.
Example 2-Gauntlet 3 (for C64). Here was a finished working game that,(& I'm only going off a story in Zzap 64), not released because of problems producing a tape version.
Speaking of which another C64 example was apparently Operation Thunderbolt-the intial version looked excellent but was canned due to mastering problems & a crud rush newly written version was released instead. As far as I know I've never seen that original version anywhere.
If Akira ever finds Putty Squad then this is a similar thing isn't it?
Just a thought-don't flame me!!

Mate. I ain't here to flame. Just to express a point of view

Giana Sisters was released commercially, but taken off the shelves almost straight away due to the whole copyright thing (so there's a chance [a tiny chance, but still a chance] that an original is floating around somewhere)

Putty Squad is a mystery though since many say it was never released, while I believe it was released, and there may be the odd couple of people that have it

But. What you say is true. If it weren't for many traders, we'd never have so many games. That's fine, but I'm just stating the legalities behind it. I'm not telling anyone to change

[Tim Janssen]

I appreciate cracking groups who have a decent cracktro and don't mess up a game with useless trainers and own credits.

Cracktro-wise, I like Prestige for their original intros. Especially their cracktro for Mortal Kombat 2 is fantastic. It features a tunnel, like seen on the highscoretable of Super Stardust. The accompanying music has a soothing ambient beat.
Skid Row-cracks are generally very stable i.e. you don't get a Guru meditation if you play a game for too long and their Cracktros are generally good. So my vote goes for Skid Row.

[Amiga1992]

Originally posted by Tim Janssen
I like Prestige for their original intros. Especially their cracktro for Mortal Kombat 2 is fantastic. It features a tunnel, like seen on the highscoretable of Super Stardust

They NICKED it from Stardust, afaik. Nothing original in it I really think it's the same routine, it's identical. Iév seen that done in other demos and stuff, but this one looks JUST LIKE the Stardust one

[Tim Janssen]

Prestige nicked the tunnel-routine from Stardust? That could be true. However, I think their MK2 cracktro tune is the best I have heard in any Amiga cracktro. Most cracktros use little chiptunes which are fun for a while but nothing special.

On the other hand I really appreciate cracktros on the C64. They are impressive getting out the most of the host machine. This cannot be said of Amiga cracktros.

[LaundroMat]

Originally posted by Akira

They NICKED it from Stardust, afaik. Nothing original in it I really think it's the same routine, it's identical. Iév seen that done in other demos and stuff, but this one looks JUST LIKE the Stardust one

I remember (it's weird how I remember unimportant stuff like this, but not the stuff that I should remember, like birthdays) that the guys from Stardust explained somewhere (I think in a scene mag) how they did the tunnel routine (smart dual playfield usage), and after that a lot of intro's indeed featured the tunnel effect. I don't think Prestige actually nicked the code, but I think they just tried to remake it 100% accurately (just for - yep you guessed it - prestige).

[Amiga1992]

That's great info Laundro IIRC they replicated it perfectly. I have to fire it up and see what's up.

Last time I remember seeing it was in a Visual Dreams 4k dentro.

Many good groups are missing in this voting.
I can not understand , why you put The Company there and not Paranoimia / Vision Factory or World Of Wonders.

As i can remember Paranoimia did from 1987 to 1990 tons
cracks more than we did in the company. The company
really soon died, coz of supplier busting ( greets to foxy and
jürgen ) .
The original Skid Row was the best with good old Metallica & FFC. Metallica really was a perfect leader. He made the best deals in the scene. Second best was Jurgen, but he has a heavy druxx problem....like the Black Cat Of Anthrox R.I.P.

[Shatterhand]

) that the guys from Stardust explained somewhere (I think in a scene mag) how they did the tunnel routine

The 1st time I readed about how they did that stuff was in a feature article from The One, Andrew Braybrook was talking about how certain amazing things were done on Amiga, so he talked about Turrican, Elfmania, and indeed about the tunnel sequence of Stardust.

I have this MK2 cracked from Prestige, and it comes in 4 disks, and if you play it with a single drive (like I did), you had to change disks just to do a Fatality sometimes, and the game also didn't have music. Now every review I readed said the game had music, and it came in 3 disks...

That's something always bugged me, and now you just remembered me to ask it.. isn't this Prestige crack fucked up?

[Codetapper]

Originally posted by Shatterhand


The 1st time I readed about how they did that stuff was in a feature article from The One, Andrew Braybrook was talking about how certain amazing things were done on Amiga, so he talked about Turrican, Elfmania, and indeed about the tunnel sequence of Stardust.

I have this MK2 cracked from Prestige, and it comes in 4 disks, and if you play it with a single drive (like I did), you had to change disks just to do a Fatality sometimes, and the game also didn't have music. Now every review I readed said the game had music, and it came in 3 disks...

That's something always bugged me, and now you just remembered me to ask it.. isn't this Prestige crack fucked up?

I don't suppose anyone has that article from The One or knows a site which has scanned pictures of it? I was an Amiga Format/Amiga Power and sometimes CU Amiga reader so only picked up the odd The One to flick through it. I remember seeing the Stardust tunnel explanation and wanted to read it but was booted out of the shop as it was closing. Alas I never saw it again. Any chance somebody could scan that or point me to where it is?

As for Mok/Prestige's crack of Mortal Kombat 2, it's a common problem with long track games - the original squeezes about 1 Mb onto the disk (RNC packed!) so it is impossible to spread a copyable version with the same number of disks. I have played the Prestige disk version quite a bit and never had to swap disks for the fatality, admitedly loading takes longer due to the extra disks but maybe I am lucky in the characters I choose. Other games off the top of my head which had extra disks are Mortal Kombat, lots of Psygnosis ones like SOTB 2, WWF Euro Rampage (terrible with a 3rd disk), Superfrog, Body Blows, all Readysoft games...

You can easily get around this problem by using the WHDLoad installer. And a little secret, the Prestige crack will work in the WHDLoad install and make it a lot more enjoyable (no more stupid disk swaps!) My USA supplier was actually sold the Prestige crack (minus the intro) as the original on 4 disks (and the disks do have the proper graphics on them etc - dodgy!)

As for the music being missing, I know if the original detects 2Mb of memory you get extra speech but I don't recall music being missing. If you are using an emulator, set the memory to at least 8Mb and play the WHDLoad version, you'll love it!

[Shatterhand]

I had this game on my A600, and I must admit I can't be arsed to try it on emus...
I don't think any speech was missing while I played with 1 Mb (I also had the Mega-Drive version, and they had the same speech), so maybe it was the music that was missing?


About this The One article, I am looking for it right now....

[Shatterhand]

Ok, I just found the article, it's on the August 1994 edition, the one with Ruff 'n' Tumble in the cover.
I will say just what Mr. Braybrook has to say about the games, and cut off the crap of what Simon Byron wrote

Elfmania:

"Elfmania is throwing a lot of stuff around, there's no doubt about it. It's all running in 32-colour mode with parallaxing, silhoutted backgrounds. But if you look carefully, the animated backgrounds stop when there's a lot going on - so the waterfall stops falling, until the processor has time to catch up. It's the kind of thing you tend not to notice while you're playing the game, which makes it a pretty good trick.
Most programmers tend to only put things in which work all the time, and most of them would throw their hands up in horror if they saw something phsyically stopping, but Terramarque obviously thought that stopping the effect was worth it. There's nothing wrong with that, the fact that it works sometimes is better than not having the effect in there at all.
Another Sneaky thing they do is with the coins. When they appear they're all flashing "ooh, that's pretty". But that's rather cunning because you only have to plot them half the time, meaning you can have twice as many on-screen"

Stardust:

"Because it scrolls around, the first time I saw the tunnel sequence, I thought the game was continually changing the perspective as the screen moves. It's not. But because you want to believe it is, it creates an optical illusion. It had me stumped for a while. I thought "How on earth are they doing that?"
What Bloodhouse has done with the tunnel sequences is create a series of animation images which are two by two screens big, with only three frames or so in each. By cycling through the images - much like you do with Dpaint - the impression of a moving tunnel is created, and because the animation screens are bigger than the Amiga's display, Bloodhouse scrolls them up, down, left and right to make you think the perspective is changing.
I expect that Bloodhouse uses DPaint with its perspective mode to create the tunnels. This particular effect isn't technically impressive itself - we all know how to do it - but affording the amount of memory to put those images into a 1Mb machine is where the skill lies. I'd guess that the tunnel sequence alone takes up at least 96 Kb, which is a fifith of your total chip ram. To give you an idea, 96kb is probably the amount of memory I'd devote to the entire sprite set for one level in Uridium 2. "

I'll type the trciks of Galactic, Turrican 1 & 2 and AGony later, if you guys are interested..

Nicely enough, both Bloodhouse and Terramarque merged and formed Bloodmarque, and they made one of the most impressive PC games, called The Reap (Akira can say more about this game, if he wants to )

I don't think any speech was missing while I played with 1 Mb

If you play with only 1mb, you are missing speech. With at least 2mb, you get different speech

There was also music which was missing with 1mb, but present with 2mb

When you have 1mb, you have alot of disk swapping to do, especially with fatalities and babilities. With 2mb, it's all pre-loaded

Stormlord, were you member of company or paranoimia?
Paranoimia cracks really sucked.
The worst nightmare was the Their finest hour
crack!!

QUARTEX rules

Toxic .... there were some important reaseons why a few of the pna cracks didnt work right
Yes, i was a member of pna and company and therefore i know, what was going on 1990/1991 in the pirate scene.
Paranoimia had the best quality crackers of the scene.
Kontrasoft, PC Ltd. , Eurosoft and others and it is not very easy
to cordinate cracking 15 titles in one week. All groups in every time had buggy cracks or bad crackers and in my opinion pna was not the most worst.

Talking about legendary Quartex i only can say, that the first qtx crew had a lot good guys, but later Quaterx turned into a bunch of lamers and wannabes trying to dominate the scene again like in 1989. Qtx were not very respected by lotsa crews in the scene , because of there unbelievable arrogance.


so stop talking about things you can not understand!!

[Carlos Ace]

I vote for Fairlight * When the Dream comes True *, with good stuff and cracks.
But also i remember a group called Paranoimia (end of 80´s begining of 90´s (?) ) with good stuff and with their diagonal scroll intro (that other groups imitated).

Individual cracker, for me, N.O.M.A.D.(What happened 2 him ? ), i learned many code stuff thanx 2 him.

[Codetapper]

Originally posted by Shatterhand
Ok, I just found the article, it's on the August 1994 edition, the one with Ruff 'n' Tumble in the cover.
I will say just what Mr. Braybrook has to say about the games, and cut off the crap of what Simon Byron wrote

I'll type the trciks of Galactic, Turrican 1 & 2 and AGony later, if you guys are interested..

Much appreciated Shatterhand, I would like to see the rest of the article too thanks if it's not too much trouble to type in!

Who is this Simon Byron you mention?

[LaundroMat]

Originally posted by Carlos Ace
I vote for Fairlight * When the Dream comes True *, with good stuff and cracks.

When dreams come through!

(Edit: Dang, as stated below, it's indeed "true". I tried to be too fast...)