The Def Guide to Zzap!64

I apologise if this has already been asked/answered, but didnt find it in the forum.
The question I have is the following:
How on earth could the "notorious" groups of yesteryear, namely Hotline and Ikari, manage and crack the cartridge games that appeared in the early nineties and translate them into disk games? (i.i. Shadow of the Beast, Pang, Navy Seals, etc)

Dumping part isn't hard, you then just to had to rewrite the access routine to point to the disk drive instead of the cartridge port.

Mayhem wrote:Dumping part isn't hard, you then just to had to rewrite the access routine to point to the disk drive instead of the cartridge port.

Do you know if there is a guide for cracking such cartridges on the web? How was dumping achieved?

Did they have special hardware for the dumping or was it something as simple as using a multicartridge switcher, with an Action Replay plugged into another slot? (probably not I guess...)

Well the dumping method I use is what you say Iain: you just need to temporarily disable the autoboot on the cart port, load some dumping software and then re-enable the port. Then dump the memory contents to disk in chunks.

Mayhem wrote:Well the dumping method I use is what you say Iain: you just need to temporarily disable the autoboot on the cart port, load some dumping software and then re-enable the port. Then dump the memory contents to disk in chunks.

On theory it all seems easy but back in the days I was amazed to find out that such cracks even existed. I remember I had managed to crack on my own all Ocean and US Gold games, without any literature or cartridges, just the old faithful CBM128D.

I wonder what has happened of those cracking groups. They had achieved sort of cult status at least in Greece, where there was no original software to buy, unfortunately.

Does anyone know the whereabouts of Hotline, Ikari+Talent, the Beastie Boys, etc?

You can find out a lot about various groups at the Commodore Scene Database: http://noname.c64.org/csdb/

Professor Brian Strain wrote:You can find out a lot about various groups at the Commodore Scene Database: http://noname.c64.org/csdb/

Amazing link, thank you very much,!! Just amazing!!