It's still up in the air when this phenomenon began to happen (1981 is as good a guess as any), but Apple II pirates, not content to merely get commercial software copied and the protection removed, started giving themselves group names ("Midwest Pirates' Guild", "Black Bag", "High Society") and began to release these pirated programs as products in themselves.
Initially, the goal was to take a program and quickly knock it down to an easily downloadable file. When this was done, the accompanying documentation might tell you who took the time to unprotect/crack the original, or a name of the cracker might be in the beginning of the program. But then it started to spiral upwards.
Within a short time, these groups started using the "splash screens" of these programs to announce their favorite bulletin boards, to take credit for unprotecting the software, or in some cases to thumb their nose at either the software publisher or other pirates. If a group was feeling particularly energetic or ambitious, they might actually create a self-sufficient animated or fast-loading splash screen just for the pirates involved. As time went on, these screens became more and more elaborate, eventually taking on an almost crowded feel as they would shoehorn in the names of the group, the cracker who cracked the game, the friends who the pirates knew (also known as "greets") and an advertisement for the board or boards the pirates hung out on.
This directory is a collection of those splash screens, taken from an emulator and cropped to exactly duplicate the original screens as they appeared on Apple IIs, both with color and monochrome versions if possible. They give a fascinating insight into what may very well be the roots of the "artscenes" of later years, including the demo and music scenes that came to dominate the late 1980s and 1990s.
There is also a thumbnail gallery of these images available. However, this is currently a very large set of images and the gallery takes a very long time to load.
As it stands, I recently did some work taking the Crack Screens of over 350 Apple II programs and putting them online. If you’re feeling like giving your machine a workout, try looking at the thumbnail gallery.
- The Digital Gang Presents Datasoft's 221B Baker Street, Brought to you by the Triton, Special Thanks to Mr. Wave and Innocent Bystander, Thanks to Sherlock Apple and Sec17
- 221b.gif (4.63 KiB) Viewed 1666 times
Source : http://artscene.textfiles.com/intros/APPLEII/
