The joy when X-Copy successfully written data over a bad sector.

@arboziz950

3 жыл бұрын

yeahhhhh

@doorshotel

2 жыл бұрын

Yes!¡!!!! Such a great feeling! I still remember my first copy, sensible soccer.

@drdark9134

2 жыл бұрын

Drat, I got a red '1', let's try 'deep nibble' mode.

@drdark9134

2 жыл бұрын

Feeling like jack-the lad cos you had a 'Cumana' external floppy drive.

@basilbrush2209

2 жыл бұрын

Yeah Haaaaaa What a lift up .... used Dcopy myself

The first thing I copied in X-Copy was X-Copy ;)

@paulponsford

5 жыл бұрын

I read in a computer magazine (back in the day) that the true sign of a quality disc copy program was it!s ability to copy it self!, and yes xcopy passed that test

@Tech-geeky

4 жыл бұрын

You copied your X-Copy disks? That's one of the tools i would never backup.... to me, it was an "exception"

@Tech-geeky

4 жыл бұрын

makes sense..Copy the copier

@sammymcfone8281

3 жыл бұрын

I had 4 different versions of xcopy on one disk. I don't think they were genuine updates.. just cracking crews modifying the ui. Sacrilege I know but I always preferred d copy.. lol

@m.m.7548

2 жыл бұрын

Shit is real ❤️

The first rule of X-Copy. Don't talk about X-Copy. Sorry. Couldn't resist.

@judgewest2000

5 жыл бұрын

What's the second rule?

@rashidisw

5 жыл бұрын

on MS-DOS pc there was Diskcopy but it was not effective for copying non-standard formatted disk, which what copy protected softwares/games uses. That being said MS-DOS's diskcopy existed for few years before Amiga's X-Copy became available.

@sprocket-YT

4 жыл бұрын

@@judgewest2000 buy a second disk drive lol

@u0aol1

4 жыл бұрын

Don't copy that floppy! Heh.

@circle2620

4 жыл бұрын

@ It is a personal computer. ;) PC = Personal computer

As a kid I never knew the games came from a shop with pretty labels. We didn't even have a shop that sold them in town. All our disks were hand-written. First time I saw a game in a box it blew my mind.

@Tech-geeky

2 жыл бұрын

Most times i tend to think, at a time, some shop owners wanted to make a profit, so they copied the game, and sold that, while keeping the original disk for themselves., (while charged the same price on the copy) That way they would get an original for their own, and also profit from some poor sucker. Or even carefully cover labels covering the original, to make it look genuine..

@EveryoneWhoUsesThisTV

2 жыл бұрын

All that free software availability meant a lot of hardware sales, which drove down the chip costs... So we were doing the future a big service by blazing away with X-copy, White Lightning and Nibble copy! :D

@darkhorsedre

7 ай бұрын

You raise a good point - the companies wanted everyone to pay for games but their marketing & distribution sucked! If they put more effort into making legit games available they may have had more sales!

I worked in the games industry back in the day. We used copied software to make the games. Piracy was rife in the games industry. Right up until I left just before the xbox360 era. Never had an official copy of Dpaint or 3D studio max. Also, it was usually always the magazines that leaked the games. I confirmed this by putting pixel-dicks on some of the textures within the games (different textures for each magazine).

@mptcultist

7 жыл бұрын

Reminds me of what happened with State Of Decay.

@julienmorris7051

7 жыл бұрын

Paul- it was different times though I think - if you could do it - you did. you had to learn how to. Not like today with youtube giving you the basics. I say fair play.

@TheRetroHourPodcast

7 жыл бұрын

We've spoken to journalists who used to write "piracy is bad folks" articles on pirate copies of word processors. As you say, it was very widespread.

@livz4691

7 жыл бұрын

PD libraries too I buy some PD disks to a library i see on a local magazine and started to recibe a catalog with all the amiga soft for about 1 euro the disk

@SocialSpit

7 жыл бұрын

Paul Robinson in no way has the "piracy industry" disappeared, the The sites have all gone private. Actually this all started with people figuring out back doors into company and industry FTP servers and stashing a few hundred gigabytes of warez there. Then if you were lucky you could get the login and download whatever "0 Day" they had. Because some of the software was so large it was compressed into zip files and then those zip files were added to an RAR archive. Then it was distributed in a span of about 20 or so 5 to 10 MB files. And then the peer 2 peer sites happened, they no longer needed to break in to a corporate server, The wares could be shared right from home PCs using the same torrents. Pirate Bay was king for a long time, but then it became a lot of underground, private websites where you have to be invited to get in. people no longer need to compress the media or software or whatever they are sharing into RAR archives, when there are about a dozen people sharing the same large files, they come in very rapidly over broadband connections. But what is funny about this is that there are still people who do compress their "releases", exe files to a zip span to an RAR archive to another zip span and then RARed again. It's like it has become a tradition. Oh, and then they will put a password one of the archives just to make it more difficult. I knew a couple of guys on a BBS, back before broadband, they ran an outfit out of their house using Amigas. interesting operating system.

Oh the nostalgia... I feel so bad about selling my A500 back in 1996. Together with all the disks...

@Tech-geeky

4 жыл бұрын

I guess the pain that all my disks were not really all originals softens the blow. How many could actually say "I have 1000+ games all origional and not a single pirated disk was along them?"

@zoomintrackout1

4 жыл бұрын

Emulators, my friend.

@donniestewart5379

4 жыл бұрын

I still smart, after lending my 1200 to my mate then he died, and his family cleared out everything before I could get it back, fantastic memories from my amiga day's.

4 жыл бұрын

@@zoomintrackout1 I use WinUAE, it works fine. But it's not the same. It's about touch, smell, form, everything...

@RikerRC

3 жыл бұрын

@ I know how you feel, I made the same mistake years ago too. For this reason, in 2003 I bought myself an A600 (before that I had the A500 just like you). Believe me, the emulator will not replace a real computer. It's damn comfortable and fast but it's not the same. Look for used Amiga 500/600, you will find something in good money :) Greetings from Krakow ;)

the whole Amiga group was such an exclusive thing amongst me and my mates. sharing games, scores etc. the best part was probably hearing about unknown games and feeling like you discovered something great and sharing it. had a thing for buying unique joysticks and controllers. the Bug! looked like a black beatle. awesome time for enthusiasts.

Omg when you booted up X-Copy I FLEW back in time to my childhood!😢 That bong!!

The second I saw Xcopy on the screen, chills went up my spine! Ahhh, the memories, the zeros, then the "NOOO" that would echo from me and my brother when there was a red 1 in there. This was a game all in it's own right. XD

@drdaze1968

3 жыл бұрын

Can you remember the other colours x copy was coping the disk to a new disks

3:58... "you write over the disc when you gt bored of the game" !!! What!!! No way - your status as a cool kid relied on how many boxes of discs you had! You just went and bought new blanks... The copy scene when I was a kid at school in New Zealand was pretty much as you describe... even in the early 80's for me in the 8-bit Atari and Commodore days. For me, one of the main reasons for piracy was that the local shops simply didn't stock the games you would read about in the magazines (Like C&VG mag in the day). In those days world travel was expensive and holidays abroad was only something you heard about a few kids ever getting to do. I guess mail order was much easier in the UK or the US but again not a reality in New Zealand. Thanks for the video - a real trip down memory lane!

@mapesdhs597

7 жыл бұрын

One of the many Amigas I obtained in recent years came with a *huge* collection of floppies. An entire shelf holds some of the disk boxes, but most are in the attic. :D

@Beer_Dad1975

6 жыл бұрын

Same here, even in Auckland it was almost impossible to get Amiga games, and if you did find them (there was a shop on Symonds Street that usually had a decent range) they were insanely expensive - well over $100 and this was back in the early 90's - so that was a lot of money. I ended up with 4 double row boxes of floppies, plus piles in the Verbatim plastic boxes you got with a 10 pack. NOt sure that had anything to do with being cool though! Maybe among my fellow nerd friends...

@TheJeremyHolloway

5 жыл бұрын

I don't think the copy scene for the Atari ST or Amiga were as cool or as in-depth as with the 8-bit Commodore and Atari computers. The Happy Drive mod - including clones and competitors - is still considered to be holy in the Atari 8-bit scene even to this day...

@Tech-geeky

4 жыл бұрын

We don't overwrite... we cherish them forever.. except me, who goes by "Why should i view something 10,0000+ times?". It's like psychical books.. If you haven't got the space, don''t read them, you'd sell them.. The same, I'd imagine is true with Amiga games as well.. Floppy disks can only take soo much beating.... but i'd still do it if nothing else, than just because i needed floppies to use.. Why would i waste money with brand new?

@Tech-geeky

4 жыл бұрын

That's almost as better as being ""The Keyboard Warrior"

great video, brings many memories. One POV no one seems to talk about is that there was no Internet in those days, and people had to learn a bit to do what you needed. Many coders discovered their passion by cracking games, bypassing copy protection and learning assembly! It boosted security and development as well, as it forced action from publishers. Oh, those glory days...

Back in the 80s in the Netherlands, there sometimes was a Amiga users club at my elementary school building in weekends. Whenever I was there, there would be XCopy running on almost all the screens. ;) So yeah, piracy was very prevelant.

@Asure007

6 жыл бұрын

Yup. Beyum, every three weeks. It was the follow up to a C64 users club, where a similar scene could be observed. Except, Fast Hack'em would be running on the screens on the C64 club weekends :)

@clarenceboddicker6679

6 жыл бұрын

What a great idea that was. My school used Acorn computers which did run some games very similarly to the Amiga, Lemmings was one of them. Having an Amiga club so members could get together and copy games was a brilliant idea, that must have been great.

@johanpranger4422

6 жыл бұрын

That's right. Been there many times . Internet wasn't avaible back then. Took my amiga with me . And it was a great way to meet other people.!

@drunkensailor112

6 жыл бұрын

I'm also Dutch and I didn't even know you could legally buy games until the early 2000s. My dad and my uncles would all copy everything. Was a great time though. My oldest uncle is 80 years now and he still plays video games every day like gta 5. it all started with amiga.

@johanpranger4422

6 жыл бұрын

drunkensailor112 yeah it was a fantastic time. The only game I actually bought was Robocop 2 ,because I couldn't wait . Loved the box though... Great to hear your uncle still plays games . Proves your never to old.. 😄

If you select the "device" button you can select to copy direct to disk. even if you have more external drives. You can write to three disks at the same time.....

You haven't lived if you haven't copied Dragon's Lair 8-disk set on a computer with only 512KB of memory with X-Copy 2 to several friends. Then you try to play it and realize that it needs the full 1MB to run with sound. Then you get the memory expansion, start playing the game and swap those disks every 20 seconds for many hours. ;) Well at least I could play Prince of Persia after that expansion! :D

@DrakulaePT

7 жыл бұрын

ahahah Miss those saturdays!! towers and towers of drilled 3,5" ;) I also got my expansion for PoP and Magic Johnson's Basketball :P And those that came with external drives got more cake :D Bless my mom for putting up with all of them around! miss it all tbh. For the haters I wasn't rich to have much hence i had some copied games. To have the A500 my parents worked really hard and took them ages to pay it! I thank them for the life they gave me and to help me became the Network Guru Meditator I am today. Haters may hate but we were Happy! We didnt kill the scene... Greed from Commodore and developers did!

@rkaid4164

7 жыл бұрын

The first time a friend and I played Monkey Island 2 (was it only 9 disks?) we got quite far in the game and were totally into it - until one disk turned out to be a bad copy, and we had to call another friend who had a copy of the game to see if was home (he was), and then get on our bikes and race down to his place, copy the disk, race back home, and finally continue the game. Those were the days!

@superdau

7 жыл бұрын

I remember playing civilization and depending on what disk the games wanted me to insert I knew what event was likely to happen even before I saw the screen.

@Webfra14

7 жыл бұрын

I haven't lived.

@pathduck

7 жыл бұрын

And then the 8th disk has a read error, just at the end of the game :D

OMG, the memories!!!!!!! I don't know how many hours i spent copying disks with X-Copy. Great video Dan. The funniest Disk copy program was "tetris copy". You copy the disks and until the copying is done you could play tetris at the same time !!!!!!!

@amigalemming

7 жыл бұрын

I guess it was called TetraCopy.

@MASTERSLY1973

7 жыл бұрын

Correct

@kevthedruid

7 жыл бұрын

i had that , another i used was called d copy

@sandrodellisanti1139

4 жыл бұрын

Rattlecopy was great, too..

@Tech-geeky

4 жыл бұрын

those floppy hypnotic sounds really had my memory on 'pause.' I couldn't think of gaming sometimes, let alone playing games while it was copying.

Oh man when you were talking about opening the boxes and shrink wrap and the smell.. that came flooding back to me! Memories!

I used X-Copy for Amiga and MSX games in the past and still in the present. It is the best disk copier ever to my personal opinion, it copies everything. Even on the MSX it self there was no copy program that would copy every single disk regardless it was protected or not. X-Copy does!

I got my A500+ that Christmas too! Memories of playing Lemmings at 7:15am 😊

@Tech-geeky

4 жыл бұрын

The first game i pirated.

What I remember about piracy was that if you liked something you bought it. Yes, I had a lot of software that was pirated but I also bought a lot that I liked and enjoyed. I do say that I really learned how to do it effectively when I had my first PC. I did not buy a lot when I first got into the PC market. But that Amiga and the community it had made me feel as I belonged to something that was positive and good. Thanks for the memories!

The most nostalgic video I've ever watched. I absolutely loved X-copy & you copying something brought it all back to me. Thanks so much for this!

I don't think my friends who had amigas owned ONE legit game between them...

@ojkolsrud1

4 жыл бұрын

I had a lot of A500 games - the only legitimate discs I had was the Workbench and Extras discs=P It's a shame, really. I wish games and software were cheaper to begin with, so people wouldn't have such a strong incentive to pirate.

Around 11.30 a disk created by Wizard is mentioned. That's me! I created it when I used to hack Amiga games 😀 can't believe it. I released it when I was about 20 years old at warez copying parties I used to go to plus I was SysOp on a BBS called Wizards World back in the day by invite only

@various6532

5 жыл бұрын

Nice!

@markduncan7638

5 жыл бұрын

Remember you back in the day haha, do you remember the Pompei Pirates discs ?

@markduncan7638

5 жыл бұрын

@G1zm0 abizmo Actually you are correct I had both the ST and the Amiga. Funnily enough I think I remember Zippy too he was way up north if its the guy im thinking of.

@DevilbyMoonlight

5 жыл бұрын

the good old days.... I ran /x for quite too on theTigers Claw BBS, I was up for a few years I think the 'Shuttle' was one of the last UK boards running

@fallingwater

5 жыл бұрын

Did you look like the kids in Hackers? :D

In Sweden we still pay a tax on all storage media to have a legal right to do private-copying like that. It's strange when you on one hand pay tax to have a right to copy content (like a friends DVD/game-disc), but on the other hand government are pretty much anti-piracy.

@iamjimgroth

7 жыл бұрын

Kim Mortensen This does not apply to software.

@UmVtCg

6 жыл бұрын

Same in the Netherlands it is called thuiscopieheffing. this means tax for coping at home although I think this only applies to movies and music. Next year usb sticks will be taxed too, I know mine will come from ebay or alibaba.

@regish759

6 жыл бұрын

we have a tax like that on blank media in France as well, been in place for about 15yrs now. but it's by no means a "right to copy protected stuff" law, quite the contrary, it is simply repaid to the SACEM (local equivalent of the RIAA which defends the rights of all affiliates, music, movie or software editors) to compensate for the damage piracy is doing to the businesses. Whether it succeds or not (and whether it is fair for people who don't use blank media for copying intellectual property) is debatable...

@napomania

6 жыл бұрын

In italy too.. But nobody talk about that no more. In italy we used to pay useless taxes without protests

@MultiArrie

5 жыл бұрын

its the same deal in the netherlands even on mp3players usb flash drives. To bypass the extra expence I ordered blank cd's and dvd's in luxemburg were they did't have a extra fee.

omg I grew up with Commodore 64 and Amiga , I still have a few Amiga's I am rebuilding a caravan and I am going to set it up with all retro computers and game consoles . love them and I missed them they had a lot of good games , great game play

Tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak sproinnnng!

@tcozzol

7 жыл бұрын

oh yes

@numbers9to0

7 жыл бұрын

Tak tak tak wrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrwwww tak wrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrwwwww wrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrwww tak tak wrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrwwwnn read/write error.

@monolalia

7 жыл бұрын

ö. . , Yeah... I can't say I miss those fragile things. Still have an Amiga, but it's all flash & optical storage. Peace at last

@104d_3rr0r_vince

7 жыл бұрын

30 tracks?

@monolalia

7 жыл бұрын

I should've known someone was going to count them ;)

Ahhh memories of working in a computer store as a teen and taking home the games and firing up x copy lol

@Tech-geeky

2 жыл бұрын

sharing comes first right ? 😇

As always, Dan Wood, you are a gifted speaker. Always fascinating watching your vids. Now you got me all intrigued about how copy protection worked on the Amiga / C64.

OMG so many memories. I remember those lightbulbs so well. Watching those zeros go by was so nerve wracking lol

@mre9346

7 жыл бұрын

Simon Thompson And it was so satisfying when the copy finished and all the lights were green. With the quality of most of the games available copying the game was often more satisfying than playing it.

I had an A600 growing up, and I never ever used X-Copy once in all my time, I didn't know it even existed, I just copied stuff directly. Trip down to Argos or Dixons for a box of extra floppies, or write over some old demo disks if things got desperate.

@adultmoshifan87

6 жыл бұрын

Larry Bundy Jr in 2000, shortly after we got a new PC, which had a CD writer, my mom offered to get the PlayStation chipped to play copied games but I said no! Not because the Dreamcast had become our main console by that point (the same trip to PC World we bought that computer my parents let me have a Dreamcast Vibration Pack!) but because I have a big disdain for piracy! I still remember the "Piracy is cool?" letter published in CVG 2 and a half years prior!

@LouiseBrooksBob

3 жыл бұрын

Hard disk installable games didn't have copy protection. the ones that did have copy protection tended to be those on bootable floppies only.

@RogueBoyScout

3 жыл бұрын

@@adultmoshifan87 Yeah, you clearly never lived in the dark ages, my friend. No offence, I agree that you should pay for your software. But when you live in a world where the nearest shop that even sold video games is a 3 hour train trip, that your parents would never let you make (rightfully so), and the lifeblood of new games is the playground? Yeah, sorry. Let's just say I'm not going to spend 4-5 years of my childhood playing 3 games. Oh, and 2 of those games you can finish in under an hour ;)

@adultmoshifan87

3 жыл бұрын

@@RogueBoyScout There was a Woolworths in my town at the time! It was where we bought Ecco The Dolphin: Defender of The Future! There was also a Blockbuster in another nearby town, where we bought Manx TT and Fighters Megamix, and an Electronics Boutique in another town just an hour's drive away, where we bought Bust A Move 2!

@jackmclane1826

2 жыл бұрын

@@RogueBoyScout Similar here... But to be honest: The first decade of my computering I didn't even know games were something you can buy. I had hundreds of hand written disks and x-copied everything I could get my hands on in circle with my friends. The first time a saw an original computer game box was... mind blowing! ^^

Nibble copy was very slow but for a reason, some disks had some kind of protection to prevent copying like that, nibble copy got past the protection

@KingOfAssists

6 жыл бұрын

About 20% of the time :) Games had to be cracked and custom boot sectors written for the vast majority of games to be copied.

@sjarken3979

5 жыл бұрын

Nibble copy was excellent to use on disks that bad tracks, or was damaged, as it often was able to save the data to a new disk.

@ruffback

5 жыл бұрын

Not Dungeon Master tho!

@Tech-geeky

2 жыл бұрын

there were disks you just could not copy...... i had a few.. Protects are better toady, but while it was eaiser on the Amiga, the protection was pretty good too.

X-Copy was the nuts on the Amiga. That a a great video mate. I taught myself 68000 and made a demo about it , but lost it now. What some people don't understand is how people found this - through meeting people in shops and talking to those who bought the same games for the same computer. Different times. Thanks for the memories.

Perth, Australia, after release there were about 10 old games in the shops for the Amiga. Wihtout the local Commodore Amiga User Group we'd have had nothing.

Really loving your videos dude. you have inspired me to forking out for an a1200, a gift to myself for 38th birthday. I had one back in the day, mainly used for octamed. would love to see you do a video on that software. you are an inspiration mate. keep them videos coming. :)

I also remember that there was another program named d-copy. X-Copy and Amiga made some friends for me. If could grab my box with games and jump on my bike and go to new people which I never talked with before. But someone told me that they used Amiga. I just knocked on the door and "hi.. i heard that you have Amiga? yahh?.. me too.. do you want to trade/copy some games? I have them with me here in my backpack... sure come in... and then you got a new friend =).. I am sure that this screen is the one i have seen the most on my Amiga. =)

@RogueBoyScout

3 жыл бұрын

I miss those times. When the word got around the playground that the new kid had an Amiga! You may not become best mates, but it like the schoolboys version of the Freemasons LOL....

@martinjgriffiths

2 жыл бұрын

That's exactly what it was like where I lived. I got my Amiga when I was 15 and suddenly I found myself talking and sharing discs with all sorts! School friends, friends of friends, some were complete strangers to me! It became a sharing network with discs being shared and copied regularly. I even later got to find out who was doing the downloading from BBS's which was such a rarity for the time! But once they had the game or demo the news would travel like wildfire! The other big thing for the time was the competition and rivalry between ST and Amiga owners! The Amiga almost always won a playground argument though!

Thank you very much for the memories. And never stop making videos. So happy I subscribed for years ago to your channel. Not many like it!

Hi there !!, Excelent video, I was at the University when I had the Amiga, we had some really heavy copying sessions on a Friday night, sweeeet memories. I was waiting for you at the video to show the different copy modes of X-COPY III, I kind of remember a weird copy mode named "HullaBallu" or something like this. I just got a BIG smile when a I saw the X-Copy screen on your video !!! Great, great video...

Bought my first Amiga 500 for £300 from a guy in the RAF my brother knew, it came with 2 boxes full of pirated disks. I always felt kinda guilty for having them and playing them...but it wasn't unusual because my brother copied tape to tape the Atari 800 XL games from another RAF dude 8 years prior...I always remember the smell of the old oil heater we had whilst that was going on, I was only about 7/8 years old myself at that time...and being locked in the cupboard whilst my brother and sister played River Raid, that vertical scrolling shooter. Now back to the Amiga 500.. two copied disks with Sound Tracker printed on them, I had no idea what the 'Tracker' meant before I loaded them..I just knew it was related to music... a year later having acquired a second hand Amiga 1200, one of the disks I got was indeed XCopy.. a copied version of course lol..I think I had D-Copy with the Amiga 500...so to cut a long story short...my introductory lesson to music production on the Amiga was indeed through a pirate version of Sound Tracker..I'm still producing music to this day. :-)

Those were the days, my friend. :D

Great video! Had an Amiga 500 and 1200 in Australia. Also use to buy Amiga Format magazine from the U.K. and others. The good old days...

funny thing - in Poland there were no copyright laws until 1994, so it was completely legal to copy games like that. my dad had a little computer shop back then and we had about 2 thousand floppy disks (5,25) of software, mainly games. we would also sell hardware, but pirated games were the main income source. I was 7 when we started in 91 and I'd spend every bit of my spare time over there, playing and copying games... those were the good times :D

Dan, do you remember Marauder - the disk copier? It was popular and was used on the Amiga 1000. It used a lot of rainbow, copper line imagery. It had a qwerk where you had to flip the screen back to Workbench before the speeds during copy were sped up dramatically. It was made by Discovery Software who went on to become a game company by the name Innerprise, making such classics as Sword of Sodan, Arkanoid, Battle Squadron.

Please do a separate vid on the A590 / GVP external hard drive enclosures :)

Thanks for showing the X-Copy in action. Great memories on my Amiga 500 and 1000.

Wow! What a nostalgia rush. I'm smiling from ear to ear. Thanks bunches!

As a kid, I saved all my money for Digipaint/Deluxe Paint and hardware upgrades. Games however, were rarely purchased.

Thanks for the nostalgia trip! =)

Brings back great memories. I used to be located near Ashby-de-la-Zouch where the Ultimate kids sold their games from their parent's newsagent. Loved x-copy, Mods, "Jesus on E's" demo and Directory Opus!

Fun video! Where I grew up in the US, the BBS scene is where we got all our "warez". Since they were all cracked, we just used the disk copy command from the CLI to share. Fun times. Watching that copy, I can still hear the drive heads clicking along.

I'd go as far as to say that piracy was the lifeblood of most computer platforms in the 16-bit era. I can only speak for myself, but I would only have bought a very small fraction of the Amiga games that I pirated. And I did still buy plenty games that I knew I definitely wanted. I knew lots of people at school that I swapped games with, but mostly it was older titles. It took a while for newer ones to circulate, by which time you'd have bought it if you wanted it. I guess it would be a different story for people who were closer to the big swapping groups or who could get them from BBSes, but those are probably a tiny minority. There was also the shady market stalls, but I drew the line at paying for pirated copies.

@ClayMann

7 жыл бұрын

I had friends who bought computers just because they could get so many games. When I sold mine I had 4000 floppy disks. For a long time after I'd keep finding them. I think floppy disks bred if you left them alone long enough.

@mre9346

7 жыл бұрын

pkaulf I've always believed this. a lot of people probably wouldn't have owned an Amiga, PSX, xbox 360 if I they thought they had to buy all the software.

The Action Replay had copy program 'Burst Nibbler' in ROM.

@kentvandervelden

7 жыл бұрын

Dry Dessert The Amiga Action Replay was Amazing!!

I pretty much 100% lived every word you said there. I was in Australia and exactly the same thing was going on late 80's at school. Thanks for the memory. I remember there was one guy whose house I was taken to who had a huuuuge setup and a "games list" of massive proportions. Many, many dot matrix printed page list. And we could just chose which ones we wanted and either swap or pay a few bucks and walk (run) home to play them!

Great video. Brings back a lot of memories from my childhood that I'd forgot about.

Was just about to go to bed...OOOOOH, an Amiga vid!

I miss amiga and I miss xcopy....

Amazing video, it brought back a lot of memories to my mind. And yes, I'd love to see a video where the background piracy scene on the Amiga gets explained.

I'd forgotten all about NibbleCopy and the pirate song. Thanks for bringing back memories!

@RogueBoyScout

3 жыл бұрын

I remember laughing my butt of as a kid when I first heard that song. And watching this video, I was going to comment on if anyone knew which copy program played it. Suffice to say, when I heard that song again, the 13 year old in my grinned like a cheshire cat. I used to sing it all the time in my bad days pirating movies 'n music. Today, I just cough up the dough. As a single bachelor, I figure no wife, no kids, I can at least pay my way for being a social failure.

Loved my Amiga 500. I used to have a hard drive for it, I forget the name of it, but it had a really nice case that was the exact shape of the A500 case, it fit it perfectly. For a while I ran a BBS off of mine using TransAmiga BBS software. It was fun to run with doors written using the AREXX scripting language. I did actually backup some stuff rather than just pirate. I always used a backup of my workbench disks to preserve the originals. I bought LOOM when it came out, that was a really nice game on the Amiga (as were most games). Good times. The myth about piracy was that it took away sales from the companies. I disagreed. The only games I pirated were ones I could not afford to buy, so had there not been a copy, I would not have purchased it. I feel that piracy lead to at least as many sales, if not more, than any they may have lost. I know I would buy a game once I could afford it if I liked it enough. And it saved me from wasting money on bad games as well.

@Autos389

Жыл бұрын

The HD enclosure you're referring to sounds like the one I had, a GVP. kzread.info/dash/bejne/hZao1qmlibTbXdo.html

@NeilRoy

Жыл бұрын

@@Autos389 Yes! That's the one, thanks! I loved that case, it fit the look of the A500 perfectly. out of all the Amigas, I wish I still had that old A500 with this HD. So many good memories with it. I had a 50meg HD on it I think was the size and I remember when I digitized my first song, it was Mr. Roboto and it took over 40megs! LOL, could just do that one song. I ran a BBS on it for a while. Anyhow, thanks for the reminder, I forgot which one it was until now. Hard to believe it was so long ago, I was 27 at the time... some... 30 years ago? Yikes...

@Autos389

Жыл бұрын

@@NeilRoy I, too, was a similar age (I'm 56 now) and had an A500. I remember when I got that first SCSI hard drive for my GVP - a 52MB bare drive cost me over $500! Good times...

Okay.. I didn't think it had to read the source disk into memory first, when using two drives? Thought it would just do a direct copy? I guess not.. Great video! :)

@TheTurnipKing

7 жыл бұрын

It could do that I'm sure but usually it'd copy the entire disk into memory incase - as was often the case - you might want to make more than one copy of the disk.

@CasualCommodore

7 жыл бұрын

Ah, yes, of course. :)

@Tech-geeky

4 жыл бұрын

I'd feel safer with direct copy... Although it would take more time,,, memory can get corrupted too at that time

Great to see that again. I remember our A500 had an internal extension to boost it up to 1MB. We also had an external disk drive and an Action Replay. What a great time....

Ah the memories. Just seeing those zeroes tick along takes me right back. And the hilarious copy protections; like selecting the correct cheese from the Monty Python manual. Good times.

I went from using a copy of X-Copy to having X-Copy Pro with the hardware copy dongle.. Worked quite a bit better than pure software on most games.

@Watcher680116

4 жыл бұрын

I still have xcopy in the original box and for some reason two hardware dongles which I never installed. Later I often used a copy program which ran from the workbench started from HD. Probably also had the option to start automatically as soon as two disks were inserted...

I really miss my Amiga 500. I had a A530 for it. 4mb ram and 40mb hdd. A fatter Angus and a super Denise. Also had the cd rom. Sadly I could not daisy chain the A530 with the cd rom. One or the other. Also had the pc emulator 1mb for the bottom. I could run pc games better than my friends pc. Use to drive him nuts.

i did few utility disks for Amiga some years ago, Xcopy was also part of many, also Powerpacker packed files nicely

I had the Amiga A500plus then moved onto the dreaded CD32 - I even purchased the keyboard and the card that fitted in the back that gave me all the ports etc.. Ran a MaxsBBS and wrote a few of my own demo's with ripped music. I loved the way the Amiga held the memory intact even when you reset and could rip out graphics and sound. Amazing machine. A 800MB hard drive was £300 too. Christ, how expensive was that! lol

Bad dudes vs. Dragon ninja alway's made me happy .I also still got my Amiga 500

@elmerfudge1891

6 жыл бұрын

I’m bad

most used was xcopy and directory opus :)

@AgentHeX_0007

7 жыл бұрын

Yep, i still use directory opus on my win 10 machine :)

@twowheelsrulecagersdrool6239

7 жыл бұрын

Yes. Directory Opus. That program and the Amiga was THE BEST. And Cygnus Ed. I did buy DOpus for my PC here a while back and do use it. Nothing like the original.

@lurkerrekrul

7 жыл бұрын

I always preferred Disk Master, especially V2, to Dir Opus. DO had a lot of features, but all the buttons took up too much room unless you used a hi-res screen and then it flickered. DM had more room for the file lists and with V2, you could pretty much customize the whole thing.

@ClayMann

7 жыл бұрын

I still use Directory Opus on PC. It happens to still be the best file manager in the world. I pirated every Dopus then, I have a yearly licence now but it is still too expensive. That's the problem with software on PC, it's mostly too expensive. Games get it, they're cheap enough that we can all buy them now no matter what your budget is. £4000 for a 3D renderer that needs that much spending on it again for the right addons? Yeah that's still fricken ludicrous. The music scene is just as bad with horribly over priced sequencers and plug-ins.

@newkfromrotterdam

7 жыл бұрын

i used to use DirWork way more then i used Dir. Opus... because it was much slimmer and yet similar customizable functionality

First time I've seen your KZread channel. Nice, but your podcast is the best retro gaming podcast going!

I remember going to copy sessions at different places around town, like the VFW or civic center where we would bring our computers and get together every month or two to share all the new games. I remember when copying the games, sometimes the game wouldn't boot even if it looked like it copied right. Then we would copy and write in the same internal drive (DF0:) and it would work. The joy of 880k floppy disks. Back when you actually went out and met people and shared stuff. I was trying to download them from pirate BBS's on my supra 14.4kbps external modem and paying really high phone bills. Then once we started doing the copy sessions I was able to get all of the latest cracked games without paying long distance phone call fees, BBS fees or tying to get access to the hidden sections of free ones that all had a ratio to keep up. Oh, the good old days. Now it's all done anonymous through BitTorrent. This did bring back fond memories of old friends. Thanks for doing this video.

Today I get my nostalgia kick of opening the new pack of DSDD disks by smelling post-it notes when I take off the wrapper.

@Tech-geeky

4 жыл бұрын

i thought most got their kick from a good cappuccino.

I've got the same Philips monitor, last time I tried it worked but smelled of ozone, hissed slightly & had 'sparklies' on the picture - any ideas of how to fix it?

@sircompo

7 жыл бұрын

Dazed - There'll be plenty of videos on KZread about CRT repair, but be careful; the voltages are potentially lethal even when it's been unplugged for hours or days, and will need to be discharged to ground. I think the most common issue is usually capacitors that have dried out, but if I were you I'd find a local repair man (or woman!).

@aphexteknol

7 жыл бұрын

Dazed What you are describing is the high voltage from the flyback literally arcing somewhere inside the chassis of the monitor. Repairing such a thing is certainly possible, but ill advised for most and best left to someone familiar with CRT repair and high voltage safety practices. :)

@dazednconfused31337

7 жыл бұрын

Thanks for the reminder guys, I do recall getting a zap from the anode on a big old brown TV as a kid. Luckily I didn't flyback (hoho). I might discharge it & look with some marigolds on. Some FAQs mentioned cleaning the dust & using silicone sealant to fix arcing, but otherwise I'll look for bad caps or solder joints. There's a scuff so maybe it got bashed going up the loft ladder. I've got my old A500+ without a modulator, but an unwired DB23? RGB plug came with it so I'll try making a SCART lead first. I'd made one for my Speccy ZX +2 but it gets double vision on my Samsung LCD, yet is fine on our Sony.

I'm watching the video, remembering all the games I copied on X-copy, but couldnt remember the interface.. then BOOM.. I see the lightbulbs over the drive and a million memories come flooding back.. The Nostalgia is overwhelming.

My brother and I got an Amiga 500 here in Canada back in Christmas 1988. We used X-Copy quite a bit. We also used BBS's to get new games back then. We upgraded it to 1 MB RAM later, then an external floppy after that. My parents bought us Arkanoid and The Bard's Tale with the A500. I have a lot of great memories with our Amiga. I brought it with me to university and I did my word processing on it back then. We did play MODS and downloaded some demos too. At first we had a 2400 Baud modem, the n a 9600 one. The Amiga 500 was a great system!

The concept of software 'piracy' during the early Amiga days wasn't the same as it is today. A 'pirate' back then was someone who mass copied software and sold it, the buyer was merely the recipient whereas today if you jump onto piratebay and download the latest film releases, you're 'pirating'. Times change and so does apparently language.

@Cuzjudd

7 жыл бұрын

I don't even remember the word pirate being used back in late 80s and early 90s

@Magnus_Loov

5 жыл бұрын

Software piracy during the 80:s and 90:s was meaning exactly the same thing. The only difference is the distribution medium. It used to be by bulletin boards (somewhat similar to todays original uploader) and mostly spreading it by diskcopying where today it is almost 100% from the net. Back in the day it was very much talked about in magazines. Take Steinberg Cubase on the Atari ST in 1989 for example. When it first was released it was a sensation. But it was also cracked and that was a reoccurring talking point in the monthly electronic music magazines of the day. A couple of years later (still in the mid 90:s perhaps) it was mentioned as one of the reasons to put Steinberg (With Cubase) on the map, so that up and coming producers was used to the workflow and bought some software later on. I never saw or heard of anybody making money from cracked software back then. come to think of it, the only time I have heard about it is from friends visiting Asian countries in the early 2000:s where they could by cheap pirated CD:s. But never during the 80:s and 90:s in western Europe, although pirate copying (non-software) always existed (again very much in Asia) and still do.

Haha, I lived a mile away from the address for the company that made Quick Nibble in 2008.

Brings back so many memories. I also bought a floppy drive with copying hardware built into it and its own software. I thought it was called Cyclone but Googling that just brings up a dongle you inserted before your external drive.

The memories! Similar story at my school but I owned quite a few boxed games back in the day. I have not heard that noise for years!

I loved my Amiga Computer, there is no fun on today's computer systems

@perseusarkouda

4 жыл бұрын

Everyone had to deal with piracy back then. If you think the cartridges were immune you're wrong. While the cartridges were a lot less affected, but not immune (remember the clones, unauthorized game collections etc) the cartridges themselves had a lot more expensive parts like chips etc. The problem with Amiga and Atari was that they thought they were established while clearly they weren't. So competitors caught them on their sleep.

@Luthiart

4 жыл бұрын

@@perseusarkouda which has what to do with Oscar's comment?

@perseusarkouda

4 жыл бұрын

@@Luthiart lol no idea, probably replied to the wrong post.

Xcopy Pro! copies everything, including boot block viruses!

The 590 brings back as many memories as Xcopy! I recently treated my A590 to a scsi2sd adapter and now its totally silent ☺️

geez the nostalgia watching this video!! just like you mentioned over in Sweden when i went to school early 90's we all used this!

When I first got an Amiga 500 way back in 1990, it was almost a select group thing. It was also very common for people to "Hook" you up with X-Copy and games, if you didn't have it. All people wanted were replacement disks for doing the deed for you. I thought it was really cool of people to do so. Hindsight, yea. . . it totally help kill the Amiga. A real shame too, so many awesome developers who started on Amiga and then jumped ship for the 16-bit consoles.

@johanmetreus1268

2 жыл бұрын

Help kill off the Amiga?! On the contrary, just like with Windows 3.11, it would NEVER been so popular without the copying. The "hometaping is killing music!" and "you wouldn't downlo0ad a car" falls into the same fallacy: that the value of a copy is of equal value of a sale... so using their calculation model, The Pirate Bay had about 6-8 times the planet's collective GDP passing through on annual basis... which of course is ridiculous. Truth of the matter is that there is a limited amount of money to be collected, and piracy has very little impact on that amount. Looking at the music industry today, the publishers have increased their profits by taking a much higher cut now when distribution is very cheap compared to before, when production and distribution of physical media was a major part of the total expenses.

@electrictroy2010

2 жыл бұрын

The games I had would NEVER been bought, because I was a kid with no money. As it was, I had to beg my parents to give money to buy the Amiga (which helped Commodore stay in business)

@electrictroy2010

2 жыл бұрын

Amiga died when Commodore died, and they died because they were spending more money than they earned. Same thing happened to Atari and Apple. (Except Apple avoided bankruptcy when Steve Jobs got a loan from Bill Gates.)

If you get an emulator for the Amiga, most of the games are what were cracked back in the day.

Wonderful video, brought back so may memories! I used X-Copy for my naughty copied disks and D-Copy for my legit disks. I remember now after watching this the relief when X-Copy managed to copy a disk without any errors :)

Could you maybe do a vid on how to restore an old Amiga? Would be really interesting.

@johalun

7 жыл бұрын

I think The 8-bit Guy did one

@romaneberle

7 жыл бұрын

yeah, there's plenty of, search for "amiga repair", "amiga restoration", "amiga battery leak", ... oh, lol, I even did one myself: search for "amiga alive keyboard repair" :-)

Sad think is that most of the money was going into publisher's pocket, not into game developer's. I can even argue that this is the real reason why a loved machine like Amiga did not have enough games to keep it going.

@zabunia

6 жыл бұрын

Commodore's bad business sense is what killed Amiga. The Amiga was a wonderful, capable computer when it arrived, but Commodore failed to evolve the product. Slashing R&D meant everything Commodore did after 1987-88 was years too late. In the meantime, the PC caught up and surpassed it on the gaming front.

@davidvincent380

6 жыл бұрын

Also Motorola couldn't compete too long against Intel.

@TheJeremyHolloway

5 жыл бұрын

@@davidvincent380 Motorola didn't have a unified platform to gain sales momentum. You had Atari and Commodore battling each other tooth-and-nail and both also fighting against Apple. Users on 3 separate platforms then also facing off against the WinTel red tide. It was like the monolithic mediocre VHS obliterating BetaMax all over again. But as much fault as I find with Intel's products, they certainly have pumped in a ton of money into manufacturing, unlike the graveyard filled with their historic competitors.

Great vid! Thanks. Brings back so many good memories!

I remember attending a computer meeting in the last years of the GDR. We few ZX Spectrum users were located in the same room as the few Amiga users (most people had C64). I wanted to see great Amiga graphics, fluent animations, listen to great Amiga sound, and experience true multitasking, but everything we got to see were grids filling with little green and yellow circles. Only multitasking we got to see was that the mouse pointer moved fluently during disk copy. :-(

I was that bellend who got an Atari ST. Oh, bitter regret, thy name is Atari.

@TheJeremyHolloway

5 жыл бұрын

Don't you mean "Blitter regret"? That is, unless you had a Mega ST, STe, or Falcon... :)

Piracy destroyed the Amiga and Atari ST platforms. Too Bad! I loved them both!

@Sc-hh7nr

4 жыл бұрын

Piracy created the amigas dominance in the 90s you think 10% of the machine gets sold with no piracy? You needed to get more friends as a kid imo

This guy is really great! Love his videos! Keep it up Dan!

On the Atari ST the FastCopy III and FastCopy Pro were essentially the same thing - As for piracy, it was common - I used to buy copied Atari 8-bit disks in the early days from a friend in a nearby town - was a weekly (Friday evening) pilgrimage to see what new stuff he had and would spend the entire evening copying disks, then the weekend playing them, and occasionally cursing because the epic new game that was the most important one would invariably have disk errors! Of course he moved onto the ST, and also Amiga later on. Ah the nostalgia! :-)

I spent $600 USD on a GVP external 120meg SCSI drive w/o any extra ram!!!

@alexjacoli6176

6 жыл бұрын

Brian Froeber well done! I spent the same for 512k extra ram in order to play Dungeon Master, worth every penny.

When it comes to copying software, I always do it for systems not sold or popular in the US and obviously not current. I call it Archival and Educational. Otherwise, it's theft.

@gentarofourze

6 жыл бұрын

Six of one, current gen hasn't got the capability yet anyway console wise but I would use it previous gens for games that were rare or not sold here though still bought things like imported rpgs for my collection, these days I just have such a backlog of pc games theres no point though I don't have much problem with say cracking dlc for a game I paid especially if its something like extra costumes for a fighting game which are just cosmetic.

This is a great blast from the past thanks!! And for that 500 resurrection! I was in an Amiga users club back in like 91 or so in Ellsworth, Maine, they frowned on the piracy and we're mainly into video toaster stuff, not games - but man back where I was going to school then, UMO, the Amiga piracy was quite rampant!:) I used my 1000 mainly for games and then sequencing using Soundscape and Bars and Pipes

Dan's channel is pure nostalgia-porn. I never owned an Amiga but I had a C64 and I used to read Run and Commodore Magazine and I drooled over the ads for Amigas. The copying scene was of course alive and well with C64 owners as well. I mentioned to a friend at school that I'd gotten a C64 for Christmas and he brought his entire disk collection to school along with the copy program and told me how to use it so I went from having nothing to an entire game collection overnight. I don't even remember that kid's name now but he was awesome.

As someone that actually bought (and still has) over 110 COMPLETE Amiga games and 58 original disk games, as well as countless cover disks... piracy on the Amiga always pissed me off a bit. I didn't make a lot of money yet I managed to pay the inflated prices here in the US for your UK games and magazines (CU Amiga, Amiga Format, Amiga One, Amiga Action, etc (I have those still, TOO!) and I view most of the Amiga scene to be just as bad as Commodores CEOs - pure greed. I honestly think piracy made the Amiga unprofitable and ultimately killed it as no one cared to invest in such a 'car boot-sale' system -- that includes Commodore themselves. Greed.

@ClayMann

7 жыл бұрын

I think you're wrong there. Piracy sold more hardware. Every pirate I knew had a real game collection too. No gamers shelves were full of just pirated stuff. There was something special about the big box. Later on when big boxes were replaced by tiny jewel cases, I still bought those sometimes but they weren't special anymore. By then I could print my own covers. They didn't look as good but they were fun to do. The big box was more like an album cover. People loved them for the art and of course the manuals that you really needed for flight sims and such. Piracy is still just as rife as it ever was only today you can pirate on a massive scale. And yet we have a booming gaming industry on PC that's bigger than its ever been.

@RetroMMA

7 жыл бұрын

I'd reply in detail if it weren't so late.... piracy may have sold hardware but it didn't sell software... No software = no hardware.

@ClayMann

7 жыл бұрын

I think it did sell software too. if you bought the hardware because there was this piracy scene that meant you could have more games. Now parents, grandparents etc. are going to buy you a game or two. You'll buy that one game because you need the manual. You'll buy this other game because you love the developers. The more you get into a scene, the more you understand it, the more likely you are to buy. I had plenty of bought games. As much as a regular console owning gamer would have. I bought the machines for creative reasons rather than games so I'm not a good example of buying for free games but most people bought hardware for that reason and then grew a paid collection anyway.

@RetroMMA

7 жыл бұрын

+Clay Mann: I'm not sure that I believe that as: people use to getting something for free, that easily accessible to them, balk at spending money on such. While it's true that family/friends might buy legit software the odds and the money thrown in their direction will be severely limited. Look, I'm not saying that I never pirated a game BUT I will say that I feed the industry MORE because I truly loved the machine and STILL have all the games, magazines and hardware (sans 1 A500 that was "broken" but I still wish I kept . At the same time, I also discarded any copied games) +Brides of Cthulhu: They kinda are :)

@richardmaudsley7447

7 жыл бұрын

What a load of bollocks. How on earth do you think SOFTWARE piracy made HARDWARE sales unprofitable? It simply didn't - ignoring that Commodore got 0% of third party sales, the Amiga reached the height of its popularity when Commodore went bankrupt. They were flying off of the shelves, with massive software support. The Amiga was simply dragged under the waves when Commodore's financial mismanagement sank them.

I suggest avoiding the term "piracy" to discribe the act of sharing with people. It's a propaganda term, which equates sharing which is a basic prerequisite of any community, with attacking ships and killing sailors. Stop playing the publishers' game by spreading their propaganda. Share software freely, even if unjust and anti-society laws attempt to prohibit you from doing so, just to maximize the profits of a few companies.

@pkaulf

7 жыл бұрын

It wouldn't be a discussion about piracy without terrible analogies, would it? Making an unauthorised copy still leaves the original copy. Nothing has been stolen. Especially if there was no possibility or no intention of purchasing a copy in the first place.

@shadowinthevoid

7 жыл бұрын

I hear what you are saying.............however........pirates are cool. Surly "piracy" glamorizes an otherwise mundane activity

@blakecasimir

7 жыл бұрын

The correct term is copyright infringement. Piracy would not be an applicable term in this case unless money changed hands for copies. Disclaimer (because people get so friggin' uppity about this): I'm not taking a pro or anti stance here, merely pointing this out.

@Smartphonekanalen

7 жыл бұрын

BlakeCasimir Agree. Here in Sweden most of the time it was no money for copied disks. Anyone who had to buy copied disks felt bad. Have in understanding that local stores did not have all the games. It was no Internet. You had to read advertisments and get in touch with computer stores that maybe did business for a while and then gone. So it was about get games in the ways it was possible.

@Weird.Dreams

7 жыл бұрын

What's the difference between someone copying a game for a couple of mates and those same couple of mates going around his house to play or borrow the game? It's the same 'crime' isn't it?

Back in the day, I saw an ad in the local newspaper that read, "Used Commodore Amiga Disks for Sale". I called the lady and said, "what do you mean by 'used'" and she said, "They all have software on them". I went to her house and she had 4 or 5 of those big, cardboard 3.5" floppy disk boxes full of Amiga software. Had to be 400 disks there. She only wanted, like .25 cents a disk or something. I'm like, "hell yea! I'll take em off your hands". She knew what she was doing. It was her way of selling pirated software without saying it was pirated software. Those were the days. Loved my Amigas!

You mentioned chips computer shop in your article. I worked in the Stockton branch in 1990/91 and Middlesbrough 91/92. B-)