When I was about 10 or 11 years old, I bought my first computer together with my brother and father. It was an Atari 800XL with cassette recorder. Soon I
obtained a disk drive and a plotter. At first I only played games and typed in those BASIC listings published in magazines but soon the inner workings of a
computer and software got my interest. My first programs were written in BASIC such as an utility to plot cassette labels and an utility to plot the
mathematical functions I just learned at school. After that I learned some 6502 machine code and started cracking some games (removing the
copy-protection and hacking cassette games to disk) and altered games so that you had hundreds of lives etc. I even wrote a small intro in 6502 machine code without
the aid of an assembler.
In the meantime I expanded my 800XL to 256KB of RAM using and old SIMM module and added all kinds of
knobs and
lights.
A few years later I got an Atari 1040ST. Also this one was not safe for my
solder iron. It now has a 4MB memory expansion, 16 MHz accelerator, stereo sound and
build in ripper cartridge. Since all this
stuff didn't fit in it's casing anymore I put the whole thing, together with
an second disk drive, in an old computer terminal
casing while the original casing was hacked into detachable keyboard.
At the same time I quickly learned some MC68000 assembler and cracked and
trained several games which was more fun than playing the games themselves. But
you probably won't find these cracks in the wild since they were barely spread.
Later I wrote a couple of demo screens of which one made it as guest screen into
the "Nostalgic-o-Demo" of
Leonard/Oxygene.
Nowadays I am also collecting and hacking the Atari 2600, 7800, Lynx and Jaguar game consoles.
On these pages you will find a couple of my Atari projects I did in the past. Hopefully this list will grow in the future since I still have some projects planned but little time to implement them.
Happy hacking.