When I rummaged through a big bunch of computer newspapers and magazines last night I found this.

The Police Scaring Kids at Party.

Big Image

This have to be the largest Commodore 64 monitor I have ever seen BTW

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Using: One Commodore C64 - One Commodore Amiga 500 - One Commodore Amiga 1200 with BVision and Blizzard 68060 with PPC coprocessor running Amiga DOS - One Hellbillylitre Amigatwox86x64x6000x running Windows7

@Hillbillylitre

So, where's the Amiga? I can't read that writing.

@Hypex

There is lots of Amiga Computers, it was probably in the majority at the time but I don't think there was other computers than Amiga and C64/128s.

It's a Demo party and for the police it was a copy-party. It also says about 20 participants packed the equipment and fled. Further more it says its normal that the police raid such parties down on the Continent and confiscate equipment and put the youngsters in handcuffs. But it looks more like scaremongering because the police wouldn't do that with fourteen year old kids, at least not here. And it says: And beware, next time may not the police come with such a nice and small force!

Last edited by Hillbillylitre on 21-Jun-2015 at 05:32 PM.

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Using: One Commodore C64 - One Commodore Amiga 500 - One Commodore Amiga 1200 with BVision and Blizzard 68060 with PPC coprocessor running Amiga DOS - One Hellbillylitre Amigatwox86x64x6000x running Windows7

@Hillbillylitre

thanks for posting this, i was at this party and this was 1 of 3 parties that got raided in Norway at the time... 2 of them being Razor's.

The reason for the raids was because of the large amount of copy parties around Norway at the time. The main importer and distrubution company " Bj Electronics" was doing what it could to stop the piracy going on but after 3 parties and only 1 guy arrested and while that guy was important (IIRC Fairlight's main cracker of its time) it still led to nothing more than a dent in my memory.

It was fun seing a friend of mine jump out the window with his floppy box though :D


PS:i was at the skedsmo party too (the most famous bust). Btw, could you scan this article?, would be very intrested in having a proper scan to put on the blog.

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@Hillbillylitre

and yes, parties around that time had a 80-20% ratio Amiga / C64. Sometimes there was an Atari or 3... and sometimes there was a lot of C64's but in 99% of the times it was Amiga at the top spot.

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@Toaks

I have no scanner here at the moment and have to use a camera but can see what I can do later.

Yesterday I searched around a bit and found this: Abnormal, Razor 1911 & The Cartel Copy party 1988
http://www.slengpung.com/v3/parties.php?order=date_from

Can see i'm wrong about the yaer because here it says 1988. I had put the magaszine between the 1989 Dator stuff for some reason, but it's late 1988 anyways.


I was not allowed to travel on such major meetings at the time so it ended up with small local meetings. Although it wasn't easy to send floppies over the phone line back then there was always plenty of local swappers on the snail mail line that reused stamps. And there was always someone who knew someone who knew someone too etc...

I knew only one person who had Atari, otherwise I had only seen em in stores for real so it was only Commodore computers around here among us kids.

The Amiga took over the C64 market here but it never got that big as the Commodore 64 was.

Last edited by Hillbillylitre on 22-Jun-2015 at 12:52 PM.
Last edited by Hillbillylitre on 22-Jun-2015 at 12:50 PM.

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Using: One Commodore C64 - One Commodore Amiga 500 - One Commodore Amiga 1200 with BVision and Blizzard 68060 with PPC coprocessor running Amiga DOS - One Hellbillylitre Amigatwox86x64x6000x running Windows7

@Hillbillylitre

That's quite interesting. I've never really thought of a copy party before. The cloest I got was accepting floppy-copies at school so I avoided the raids all together.

I also recalled loaning some games to a friend, one being TestrDrive II, and never got it back. I never pirated again.

Last edited by Hypex on 22-Jun-2015 at 03:10 PM.

@Toaks

Amazing. A historical witness! That floppy out the window does sound funny. Hehe. :)

@Hillbillylitre

Quote:

The Amiga took over the C64 market here but it never got that big as the Commodore 64 was.

That's because the Amiga wasn't compatible with a C64.

The C64 was like a messiah which caused all Commodore people to hate all Commodore machines that weren't a C64 or compatible with one. The big followup, the C128, almost flopped, had it not been a double C64. Commodore were forced by the market they created to make the C128 compatible with the C64, working against it being a new ground up design, and slighlty crippling it.

The beige colour of the Amiga lulled the C64 people into a false sense of security. Then attacked them with CBM printers that had to work in IBM mode, no Commodore character set and finally the kliler blow of Microsoft Amiga Basic!

@Hypex
Quote:

Hypex wrote: @Hillbillylitre That's quite interesting. I've never really thought of a copy party before. The cloest I got was accepting floppy-copies at school so I avoided the raids all together. I also recalled loaning some games to a friend, one being TestrDrive II, and never got it back. I never pirated again.

If it weren't for the hundred or thousands of pirated games I don't think the Amiga had been as popular among the youth as it was and Amiga sales number had been lower, probably much lower.

I guess 95% or even more of all the games I had was pirated. One could not expect that the parents bought an expencive gaming machine to their kids and in addition bought thousands of games, then you could just as well get an Nintendo. But I can remember the grown up kids bought some games.

It was almost like it was passed down from the C64 where everyone had tons of pirated games. I can not remember how many games I got onto a C90 compact cassette, but it was many.

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Using: One Commodore C64 - One Commodore Amiga 500 - One Commodore Amiga 1200 with BVision and Blizzard 68060 with PPC coprocessor running Amiga DOS - One Hellbillylitre Amigatwox86x64x6000x running Windows7

@Hillbillylitre

I quite agree with you about the pirated games. It's a sad fact that the Amiga was popular for the same reason that VHS porn was as it kliled off Beta. Still I was a rather honest chap and did buy my own games as well. I payed full price for classics such as Indy 3 adventure and Test Drive 2. And sought out bargains like multi packs where I got bulk games for cheaper then the original.

I also played a lot of cover disk demos. Infact I had more demo games by the end than pirated games. But I used to enjoy hacking into the demos. Well I called it hacking. I would pull it apart and chop at it, modify and patch it, so hacking. I would seek out cheats or install my own. I even expanded a limited RoboCop2 demo to include the whole level. Enjoyed that game, which I had the full one.

But the pirated games annoyed me after a while beacuse they didn't have any instructions. Even for a simple shoot em up I wanted to read about it and read about all the controls. With flight simulators you might as well forget it without a guide. I hate stabbing in the dark. It was hard enough doing that with code!

Also in the Commodore years my C16 games were $10 a cassette so easily affordable. Don't know if I had pirated C16 games. Did they make any?

Last edited by Hypex on 29-Jun-2015 at 03:13 PM.

@piracy

I wonder how much had it affected the pirating situation if right from beginning both users as well as their parents would have knew that it was illegal to copy games.

I remember I had been copying games for maybe 5 years before i for first time read somewhere that it wasnt actually allowed, but at that point both me, as well as all the other kids in my elementary school already had loads of copied games each, hence the realisation of that didnt quite have the effect it should as basically everyone should have been punished already and it already felt normal for everyone to have them.

I am also pretty sure that if my father had realised it wasnt allowed to copy games and software, he would have forbidden me to do so and probably removed all the unnecessary empty disks from me.

When considered that I was connection to many others who didnt know each other, it could have actually affected the number of titles available for copying locally at least.

But all in all, if parents and users (kids) had realised it was illegal to copy right from beginning, I think more original games/softwares had been sold then. But might be that many games hadnt been made then either, without the benefit of for example DPaint having been copied around. Or, perhaps there had came more and more effective free giveaway schemes to for example Dpaint. Hard to say.

Last edited by Bugala on 01-Jul-2015 at 07:18 AM.

@Bugala

Whose this piracy person you reply too?

Quote:

But all in all, if parents and users (kids) had realised it was illegal to copy right from beginning,

I wonder, did any of us not know? I mean, we didn't buy the game, we got a disk clone, so to me it seems obvious it was morally questionable and not the right thing to do because the game company and programmer did not profit from it.

I can see where the lines can be blurred, because in piracy no physical theft needs to be involved. When you steal a loaf of bread you physically take it. But if you "pirate" a loaf of bread, the loaf of bread isn't stolen but is simply cloned and that one loaf of bread can be used to feed more. All in the spirit of sharing.

If anything, piracy was probably good for floppy producing companies like Verbatim, since their sales went up! You couldn't "pirate" a floppy disk, since you still needed a physical medium to write the software on.

The internet makes this almost redundant since the software is stored up in the "cloud" and can be downloaded to a chosen device or storage medium.

Quote:

But might be that many games hadnt been made then either, without the benefit of for example DPaint having been copied around.

DPaint is an interesting example. I have a real copy of DPaintIV. Which I got in my A1200 bundle. Excellent bundle that.

And before then I used Fusion Paint. Those Commodore bundles were great for programers and users alike. I also came across a pirate copy of DPaint5 which brings your point home. Which, as irony would have it, includes a message to spread the word and not the disk.

You bring up some excellent points for discussion here.

@Hypex

I got my first computer the same year i went to elementary school and started copying games when i got cassette drive and found out you can copy them. Then came Amiga and same continued, never did it even glimpse my mind that there would be anything wrong with that until some magazine article said it.

And even then I didnt think of why was it wrong or wether it felt right or wrong, but simply that it was stated as wrong. At that age it wasnt necessarily so much of why something is wrong or if it feels wrong, but rather it was a question of understanding that there are some rules, and if some rule says something, you do so.

There were only very few wrong things that actually would feel wrong at that age, they would be hurting of someone else, stealing from someone or something else similar very clearly wrong. That I cant walk against red light never felt good or bad. It just wasnt allowed, and hence it was exciting crossing the street on red light.


What comes to my parents. Mother probably didnt think about the issue at all, and father was thinking computer as just another toy, although a more useful and educating toy, but very much toy regardless, and hence he would completely miss the point of there being games illegally copied, as he would just see you getting another toy thing to your machine. Just like having one of those water washable tattoos, that if you had one, you could use it to give to your friends one too.

I doubt he quite realised that there were some sole makers making those games. He probably thought them more like all being made by Commodore to sell the machine or something similar, despite the fact that he did buy couple of games to me as birthday/christmas presents. But the basic mindset was probably that kind.

Or maybe he thought the games i got were all free games or something. Knowing my father, I anyway doubt he would have allowed copying of illegal games if he had realised it, since he was quite strict on things like that.