Well, it has been quite an interesting few days. I knew that when I was heading down into the abyss of this production that I'd probably get hit across the face a few times with the Bat of Unexpected Tidings. I've been hit with said bat as expected, and picked myself when it came crashing down at the inevitable late hour or difficult event.
I have been hit with another such bat, and it has caused a few days delay. And a small but signficant bit of money. And a lot of frustration and browsing to see if in fact it's not me, and realization it is not, and then more frustration that the situation existed in the first place. You know.... life.
First of all, let me get this news out of the way. The project is done. Done done done done done. I have generated all the content, put in all the subtitles, slid in all the easter eggs, added all the commentary tracks, and put in all the DVD-ROM material as the whole thing is going to get. It's all in there. I can pop a DVD+R DL disc I have burned using this nice dual-layer DVD-R drive I got, and put it into my DVD player, and watch it, as you will watch it. I can do this for all 3 DVDs.
It's great. I'm really proud of the whole look of it, the sound, the stories, and a number of style choices I've made throughout the episodes and bonus footage. This is a solid, COMPLETED, three DVD set with seven hours of footage on it (6 hours and 52 minutes, actually) and another two hours of commentary, along with thousands of photographs and other BBS artifacts. It's a big thing, and it's taken me a long time to get it all where I'm happy with it. (Like most perfectionists, I'll never be 100% happy with it, but I definitely can watch and enjoy this a lot.)
So great, just burn out those final discs and send them to the printer and get that long cool glass of root beer and sit by the beach, right? Well, not so fast.
Warning: This gets really involved and technical, but then again, that's what I had to do to understand what was going on, so I wanted to pass along what I went through, in the hope someone will find this information going down the same path.
My project consists of three DVD-9 DVDs. This means there's roughly 8.5 gigabytes of information capacity on a one-sided DVD. The other DVD formats are DVD-5 and DVD-10. DVD-5 actually holds a little over 4 gigabytes of information on one side, and a DVD-10 is actually a DVD-5 that uses both sides (so it has no label, since it uses both sides). I was assuming I would have roughly 7 to 9 hours of content, and so I thought about it and went for DVD-9. This actually turned out to be rather good, considering the addition of the DVD-ROM content/photos and my ample use of bonus footage and edited-out sequences. I think that I'll be using something like 80 percent of the capacity of the three discs combined.
The way DVD-9 works, is that there are two layers on the DVD, one on top of the other. The laser that reads the disc can focus on one layer or the other. And here we get into the problem.
Half the data (roughly 4 gigabytes) on a DVD-9 disc is stored in the first layer, and then the rest second half (also roughly 4 gigabytes). At some point, if you're using a lot of the data, you encounter a place where data is coming in, but the laser has to switch over to the other layer. This is called, in DVD mastering parlance, the "Layer Break Point".
Now, normally, this sort of techno-wonk information about how one of my appliances works would be of little interest to me, at least within the context of the project, in the same way I don't really concern myself with how a CD burner works by shining an intense light on sensitive material inside plastic, or how my car works by turning gasoline into a flammable mist to cause tiny explosions in chambers that hold pistons.
But, see, DVD players don't handle the Layer Break very well. As time has gone on, the most recent of DVD players, and most of the players that come in computers, all know how to deal with this Layer Break fairly well, having a sufficiently large buffer, quick-focusing laser, and all that, so they can bang from one layer to another. But most people do not have the most recent of DVD players.
So how do "Hollywood" DVD-9s deal with this problem? Apparently they jog around the Layer Break so that it happens in the middle of a fade-out. Or they reduce the quality of the encoding for 10 seconds before the Layer Break so the buffer has gotten enough so that it won't be empty before the switch is done. Or they simply leave it in and that's that.
In other words, a bunch of lame crappy hacks to deal with a problem that shouldn't have existed in the first place.
So on my DVDs, I have found the layer breaks. Of course, I didn't KNOW they were; I was positive I'd screwed up somewhere. I could see the machine hanging on that part as I went back and forth over the point, and I simply assumed I'd broken the encoding somewhere, or otherwise had a damaged disc. Until I burnt another, and it did the exact same thing. And if I ran it on my laptop's DVD drive, it worked fine. And so on.
Apparently, I have to grit my teeth and eat this fact of life, but I am now working with Ulead DVD Workshop 2, which, I must again state, blows, and make it shift around the files on the DVD so that these "Layer Breaks" happen somewhere other than the main episodes on the drive. It is taking me considerable time to do so, and each move is taking a lot of time to experiment with.
So basically, what's keeping me from sending these to the Printer is my own perfectionism, my refusal to let people who buy this thing deal with a sudden hiccup in the middle of an Episode (at least with bonus footage, it'll be an annoying thing and not a major problem) and then feel its their problem.
I hope to have this resolved very, very shortly. Like, in the next day.
TEXTFILES.COM: AN INTERVIEW WITH KRAKOWICZ
Conducted by Jason Scott, February, 2005
It's hard for me not to sound superlative about Krakowicz, and there's a good set of reasons why. He is a member of a relatively small but memorable community, that of Apple II Crackers from the early 1980s.
In much the same way that a lot of troublemakers and brigands from the past take on an almost nostalgic haze with the passage of time, so it personally seems to me with these software pirates of old. Groups like the Midwest Pirates' Guild (MPG), 1200 Club, Digital Gang, and many others would take commercial software, remove the copy protection on the floppy diskette the game came from, and distribute the now-easy-to-copy software to waiting hands and drives across the country. They started a tradition which has continued to the present day, of acting less like criminals bent on smash and grab crimes, but more like flamboyant masterminds, able to take the time to leave distinct calling cards on their work before sending their "wares" along to the world.
These calling cards manifested themselves in elaborate "Crack Screens", which branded the now-cracked software into a work at the mercy of the crackers, ready to do the bidding of whoever copied them. The race to get their hands on a piece of software, crack it, and distribute it made for some intense battles in those now-gone days.
I collected many dozens of these "Crack Screens" on textfiles.com at this location: http://artscene.textfiles.com/intros/APPLEII/
Krakowicz' handle shows up on a large collection of "warez" from the period, and certainly has some amount of fame (or infamy) for that alone. But beyond that particular trait, he also did something very few other crackers did: He gave away all his secrets of how he was accomplishing it.
These manifested themselves in Krakowicz' Kraking Korner, a collection of files written and distributed on Apple II floppies which provided hints, tips, and instructions on the sort of work Krakowicz was doing to accomplish his craft. They are both witty and accurate, and they leave the reader feeling smarter, far beyond the ability to make an arcade game copyable, but knowing some of the core concepts of programming itself. They are, in a word, a treasure.
I had stated publically that Krakowicz was one of my great unknowns, one of the few figures from my youth who I had either not contacted or heard from, who I would love, given the opportunity, to meet or have a conversation. In late 2004, that wish came true.
Krakowicz contacted me through a double-blind anonymous account, and after some sharing back and forth of information, we confirmed each other's authenticity, so to speak. What follows is a question and answer e-mail interview conducted in February, 2005, where I've asked Krakowicz a number of questions about his craft, the world that he lived in when kraking was his hobby, and what he thinks of some of the modern day.
For the record, he himself pronounces his handle "Crack-oh-vitch".
THE INTERVIEW
Do you remember the time or the time period where you came to realize that it was possible to make a game function as a copy-able program instead of a monolithic, protected disk? That is, was it an outside inspiration or something you devised?
It was probably when I first came across a kraked game disk that was previously uncopyable, and thought: "I could do that!". I was introduced to "shared" programs by teenagers in the local Apple user's group.
What do you think are the most forgotten aspects of the Apple II period (1977 - ~1988) that really should be remembered and understood?
For me, it was the extraordinary fellowship of Apple owners, the way they loved to work with computers hands-on, and the joy of sharing experiences and knowledge about it. Also, the incredible genius of Woz in creating the Apple hardware (as well as integer Basic), and the unbelievable efficiency of the disk drive interface card. Third, very few people remember that a fledgling Microsoft corporation wrote Applesoft, the floating-point Basic that was put in ROM for the Apple ][+.
The most forgotten program is likely "Cattlecar Galactica." Bruce Tognazzini (who wrote "The great probability machine" that everyone got on tape with an early Apple, and which was possibly the greatest achievement ever in low-res graphics) put together a hilarious, comprehensive disk that took command-line inputs and corrupted them in very funny and clever ways. If you typed in "HGR," the response was "RCH," the acronym for the smallest known measurement in the English language. The original disk was copyable, but when you tried to load it, it switched back and forth between two disk modes, and just went "swish-swish" endlessly in the drive. You had to sector-read it and fix the intentional error to play the game--in other words, you had to be an Apple cognoscenti in order to appreciate his humor and genius. One instruction would give the plaintive response "Free the Milpitas 8!"
Fittingly, he's now a sage, sooth-sayer and user-interface consultant, still in California's Bay Area (http://www.asktog.com/).
Among your kraking solutions was to do actual hardware modification to the Apple so that it could turn on the programs and then take out memory snaphots. The Freeze [another Apple II cracker] told me of actually having a custom setup where it could act like a regular apple until the program was loaded, and then he would flip a switch and it would go to the modified chip. Do you remember the process of coming to use hardware solutions to deal with this problem?
Yes--this and other hardware modifications came from my first personal computer experience in the late 60's--a Linc-8 system in a hospital laboratory moonlighting job I had in college. The Linc-8 was a DEC PDP-8 implementation of the Laboratory Instrument Computer developed at Washington University in St. Louis. It was way ahead of its time; had dual DECTape drives, a CRT with a character generator, a 12-bit multiplexed A to D converter, sense switches for program branching, and a teletype for programming I/O. With the sense switches, you could make a program do different things by changing the switch position, and I extended that to the Apple ][.
The other thing I loved to use on the Linc-8 for program debugging was a variable clock (you could run at 1 Hz up to 1 MHz, or single-step, just like the system I implemented for the Apple in the "bus rider.") There was also a pair of pre-set address registers ("E-stop" and "F-stop") that would halt the computer when a given location was Fetched or Executed, allowing you to examine the stack, flags, or memory location contents.
Because the 6502 had an "NMI" (non-maskable interrput) line, it was possible to halt the machine and examine its contents under different times and levels of a game. That was an irresistible early hardware mod, as was the custom F8 EPROM. I had just enough electrical engineering training to know and describe how to implement the debouncer circuit so it would work correctly (I started as an electronic hobbyist by building a radio out of Popular Electronics magazine when I was about 10).
Was there ever a program, disk, or other project for the Apple II that you looked at and ultimately felt, for whatever reason, that even though you COULD crack it, you wouldn't do it?
No--this was not a punitive or commercial activity, it was a learning experience. I think part of it was to teach the software publishers that they were irritatiing their customers as well as wasting a lot of their money coming up with protection schemes. The other part was to better understand the apple, its hardware and operating system, and to inspire others to learn what I had learned.
I actually owned or copied very few programs, and probably played fewer of them than most pirates. However, I always considered Beagle Brothers software to be inviolate--they had great humor in their work, and really clever programs (and they were smart enough not to protect their programs). I always thought those traits should be rewarded.
What inspired you to make the Kraking Korner guides?
There were several driving forces. Realizing how much I had learned about the Apple and its software from The Blue Manual, The Red Book, Beneath Apple DOS, and other sources, I felt that it could be a conduit for instructing others in the engineering skills, as well as the creativity, that was inspired by the hidden phrases in protected programs like "Bet you can't crack this one!" I thought that as long as there was an inspirational driving force (free game software) that caused bright young minds to look more deeply into technology, it could add knowledge and insight as well as hours of fun.
Also, although I didn't intend or realize it at the time, the series became excellent training and practice in effective written technical communication. When I look back at those articles, I see the seeds of a writing style that served me well as I progressed to more significant positions in industry over the decades.
Do you have any thoughts on the art of programming and working in machine language?
I'm not a programmer; not even an engineer, but since the first assembly language program I wrote, I found particular challenge (and later satisfaction) because you had total control over what the computer did, AND, it had to be exactly right! Now, even if you can't spell, Google will forgive and correct your inadequacies. The 6502 was fun (even with its page-boundary bug that I once saw exploited for protection), and the memory-mapped I/O structure allowed simple interaction with the Apple hardware.
Was there ever a time you met someone who had created a game you had cracked? Or, conversely, were you contacted by anyone whose game you had cracked, positively or negatively?
I never met any of the authors of the games, and they never contacted me. If you still have the description I sent of the Arcade Machine incident, I felt that was one of the most ironic episodes in the entire experience--a manufacturer makes a protected program, sells it to kids for generating other game programs which it intends to distribute, then unwittingly ends up distibuting a game developed on a cracked version of its generation software. I called their offices to tell them how stupid they'd been, and the person who answered said "Can I place you on hold for a minute or two, while I find the right person for you to talk to?" They really thought I might hold while they traced the call!
[The description of the incident that Krakowicz speaks of follows]
My all-time favorite story of this era, however, concerns Arcade Machine. If you don't recall, it was a game creator to make left-right shoot-em-ups of your own design, which the publisher (I think it was Broderbund) would then re-distribute if they were good enough (to run the games made with it, you were supposed to have the original disk of the program, but I also removed that requirement so the games would auto-run without the presence of the program master). The program inserted a hidden splash page so the publisher could tell if your game was indeed made using their software. After I kracked it(and it was quickly distributed by the usual suspects), people started using the pirated version of it to produce games, some of which were subsequently distributed by Broderbund. Apparently, not all the people knew about the hidden screen (and the publisher didn't bother to check) to see if it was intact. It wasn't. I altered it to reflect the unprotection, then stuffed it back where the original had been. When the publisher sent out one of the games, it had actually been written using the kracked version, then sent in for publication. Cursory examination of the commercial game showed the "unprotection" screen. I wrote a press release entitled "Publisher Pirates Publisher," and mailed Broderbund a copy. The press release made it to quite a few bulletin boards, but I don't know if it survived the ages.
Were there any other crackers or cracking groups you looked up to or admired? Were there any specific qualities about them that particularly appealed to you?
There was one game (whose name has passed from memory) that was kracked by someone who went by "The unknown kracker," and drew a picture of a brown bag with cut-out eyes using ASCII screen characters as part of his logo. The game was a tour de force of protection, and used almost every single scheme ever devised to protect it. The problem was that you had to be good enough at playing it to get to each level to find out that there were yet more protection schemes, and then go about removing them. I think he found and removed them all, while I had to give up because I wasn't adept enough at playing the game.
I greatly admired the author of the boot-tracing techniques, but I'm no longer sure who that was. I seem to recall that Mr. Xerox took credit for it, but I'm not sure he was the originator.
Was there a particularly difficult, involved, or brain-crashing crack you still remember to the present day? One where the software company laid an unusually involved technique or process in your way to cracking the game?
I kind of answered that earlier (they told us to read the entire test paper before ansering the first question, but I was always impulsive), but the system that was most challenging to me was SSI's RDOS. They had very cleverly disguised the boot-up (it was called "qwerty" so you might think it related to keyboards only), and the routines to read, write, move the head, etc., were very arcane. Deciphering all the code, and making sense of it so I could explain it to others, was probably the hardest task I encountered while kracking.
Was there an uncrackable game, one where you finally turned away from it, considering it too much time lost to finally and totally crack it?
Other than the one I was unable to play well enough to complete (cracked by "The Unknown Kracker"), I don't recall one that was too hard, or took too long. The more complicated the protection, the greater the challenge it provided, and the more fun it ws to krack. Besides, as Neitzche said, anything that doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and each technique mastered made the next one easier.
Were there any particularly clever software protection methods you still hold admiration for?
Sometimes the journey is the destination. As each new technique was developed, it was a real trip to find it, figure out what was being done, and eliminate it. The first time I saw code that was set up to deliberately corrupt the Monitor's disassembler, I relly loved it! I'm an inveterate namer, and my favorite expression of all the techniqes used was the "window shade" technique. A sensitive piece of code was hidden by exclusive-or ing it with a garbage byte. When it was needed, the routine was "rolled down" by exclusive-or ing it with the correct byte, and immediately afterward, it was "rolled back up" with the same cloaking technique. After the first few, you learned to look for the hex value of the XOR opcode (it was rarely used for legitimate purposes in gaming), so the protectors began to hide that instruction with other techniques.
What struck me most about the basics of kracking series was how you laid it all out, did your best to bring people into an understanding of not just the process, but the thinking behind cracking. Did you get feedback about this? Did you hear from people who were cracking and getting their start thanks to the series?
This was before the days of effective email, so most of what was said was through posting on BBS's. I saw a number of posts that indicated people had enjoyed the series, or learned from it, but there were probably just as many posts telling me to stop quoting soppy poems or Ricky Skaggs songs, and just get on with it. I didn't visit many BBS's, so I don't have a good feel for true sense of the chatter.
I think there were over a dozen episodes of the Kracking Korner, but I haven't been able to find them all, even searching various textfile archives. Most were written with a primitive 40-column word processor, and contained embedded ASCII graphics, so re-formatting has lost some of the material. I was touched when, many years later, my son sent the link to your description of my original work.
Cracking groups continue to this day. Do you have any thoughts about them, or do you pay attention to that world at all anymore?
I have to say I'm completely ignorant of current activities. The level of sophistication of software has increased dramatically, and so much of what is done now is in high-level languages, that it passed me by, technically, about 20 years ago.
Are there any social groups or projects that you see today on the Internet or modern computer world that give you a similar feeling to the Apple II Cracking days?
Certainly, today's open source projects operate under the same egalitarian perspective as the kracking community of those days. Also, the people who test corporate and network security systems, whether gainfully employed doing it or just having fun, as long as their motives are to protect rather than to steal other people's property or to create worms and viruses.
Is there any sort of message or thought you want the world to know from Krakowicz?
OK--you asked for philosophy, so here it is.
Sometimes, in base pursuits (getting free games, for instance), unintended but nobler consequences result. Challenge, knowledge, training, experience and growth were all a result of the pursuit of Apple software unprotection, and the simultaneous technological development of bulletin board software (very much the forerunner of the internet for most of us) allowed the sharing of those desirable outcomes with others. If they learned, developed, figured things out and grew in any positive way as a result, we are all the better for it. If not, we sure had a lot of fun and comeraderie as we explored the ways in which the earliest (and for many of us, the best) personal computer enriched our lives.
Krakowicz
The BBS documentary DVDs may have something which hasn't been tried before. I have subtitles in English (and in some places, Spanish as well), but I have a third subtitle set called "Non-Technical". Basically, when people throw out terms that are completely from left field ("8-bit", "Acoustic Coupler", "8080"), the "Non-Technical" subtitles define them, at least in a way that makes it all a little more clear.
None of these non-technical subtitles will win any awards for depth; I define "Arpanet" as "An early version of the Internet." Effective for the purposes of something showing up at the bottom of the screen, but I wouldn't go in front of class with my book report and give that. I found the first 40 minute episode got 52 explanatory subtitles, including my favorite, "Don't get hung up on all the details here."
I have no idea if this feature is useful or wanted. It might be really annoying to have this occasional spate of text at the bottom of the screen explain something you already know. But maybe, if you're watching these episodes with friends, it might help explain something you're having trouble getting across.
Anyway, it's in there. Adding them is reminding me how much I know these episodes by heart.
MAKE IT PAY is now done.
All of the episodes need a final run-through and re-render, mostly for extremely, extremely minor things, like a fade going a second too long or a spelling error in a title card. All of these are just one-off tweaks before final render.
Last night, I sent mail to the 15 main interviewees of the MAKE IT PAY episode, explaining to them the different parts of the story as I portray it, along with any controversial aspects or accusations that are included. I am not fond of blindsiding people, and I want people who are mentioned in varying light to know what's going to be on the production.
Personally, I don't think anybody takes a big hit, and what I do put in, I include a couple of points of view to, but I didn't do this whole project to 'get' people, and so I don't want someone who opened their home and time to me to feel surprised and hurt.
A lot of the remaining work is reactive and simple: chapter divisions (unbelievably simple in DVD Workshop), commentary recording, subtitle placement (they're already typed), and so on.
MAKE IT PAY is basically done.
I need a few more shots of the inside of ONE BBSCON to make what people are saying about it more illustrative, but otherwise, the thing is pretty much nailed. This is the last of the episodes, and brings to a close "new" content, that is, episodes or footage not already rendered out and being analyzed by The Eye and myself.
What's left is mostly mundanity: shoring up the subtitles (it'll be in either 2 or 3 languages, depending on the footage, and depending on who was available to translate), testing the menus, adding chapters (I have chapters work, but I don't do those silly "one hundred billion little video windows you scroll through" menus), and then testing, testing, testing.
I refuse to make predictions of any major amount, but if this thing isn't out the door to the printers in the next week or two, someone should come by and hit me with a sack of potatoes. I hope to have everything out by end of month, but I had hoped it would be done by the end of November 2004, too. I am not good at predicting the full weight of the rock I am carrying.
MAKE IT PAY, as an episode, is somewhat taxing on the editing side, because what we have are two sides to the story, which are simply at odds with each other. On one side, you have people who built BBSes for the fun of it, as one might tinker with a car or collect comic books, or host parties for your friends. On the other side, there were a small army of folks who saw personal or general financial gain in this amazing new technology, where they could create software for sale, or charge to use their BBS, or otherwise eke a living out of this unchartered territory. As you might imagine, these two outlooks didn't co-exist entirely well.
Subsequently, we have these multiple great figures, and I mean "great" in the larger-than-life sense, who were well on their way to sculpting out an online industry from the foundations of the BBS, and then we also have a chorus of voices saying "what are they DOING? Why are they going to RUIN IT?" I was, as a person, very pleased to have gotten all these great interviews with people who were figures from my memory, people who ran the companies that made software I used daily. But I also had to include the voices that felt trampled or used by these same figures (or at least, the industry they represent). So it goes back and forth.
I suspect that to some people I will have barely scratched the surface of the story, but a part of that is because it's one hell of a story, and needs a book, just like the Fidonet story (and for that matter, many other stories I do not tell in the scope of this episode set). I may only scratch the surface, but it was a very unscratched surface.
I will update with some general technical and wrap-up information next, after this, talking about what's on the DVD set. Which is a ton.
