Is this you Bill Gates 🤔

@@mrkitty777 no, this is Trixter; of PC demoscene fame.

@@BrendonGreenNZL ok, i heard about Federation Against Commodore once and they make demos about bad C64

I wish that could work, but I don't think there's even enough room for a single "beep" command on that floppy.

@@Trance88 nonsense. You can fit an entire encyclopedia onto a floppy disk.

Good old BASIC interpreter! I use SpeedCrunch as my calculator on Linux for the same immediacy and lots more capability and time/typing-saving features.

Kinda feels like that still

I only just learned of its existence just earlier this year, and was pretty thrilled to find a copy shortly afterwards.

I also had that Sega CD disc!!! That Information Society video on there was the best thing on it, and I remember listening/watching that with some sense of mystery/wonder because it seemed to cutting-edge 🤣

An Ovaltine ad would have been more satisfying.

Nice, I hadn't heard it was officially downloadable before. Do you remember if it was just the same 3 files in a .zip file? I realize it's been a long time :)

Yeah, it's hard to know if it was a bad night or what. I've played enough live music to know how badly it can go; lots of the time the band has no control over the monitor mix and when a singer can't hear themselves sing, it goes BADLY. Or maybe that was late enough in their run that they were burned out and just going through the motions. Here they are live in 1988 and it's pretty good, and there's enough moments to convince me it's actually live and not just lip-synced. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/sKx6fpeCt-CtmIE.html

Kurt singing Conspiracy Theory was good.

Cool! Barenaked Ladies, the band, went to my highschool in Scarborough, Ontario. :)

I just scrolled down to say they were in my High School, so I know where you went to school ;) They only graduated I think about 2 years before me. I never knew them, I only found out about this later.

@@dazealex Cool! Michael J. Fox went to 1 or 2 of my schools in Burnaby, BC. The teachers talked about him, and I vaguely recall 1 of them telling us where his locker was. I wonder who will join our Canadian discussion.

yeah, write something in the C64 emulator to exercise the disk head :-)

Anything is possible, but honestly it looks like it was written by someone with a thick BASIC accent. I don't know those types of translators were all that common in circa 1988 when this was written. It's not uncommon for someone skilled in one language to learn another, but their coding style comes from the language they're more fluent in. Years ago I recall seeing Java code that was obviously written by someone who was primarily a C programmer.

It's pretty fast for running on a 386SX! :p

It would have been cool if they included only the backdoor information but not the secret content in the .C (call it an earlier version?), then some secret stuff in the .exe but the super secret stuff in the "Leaked .obj" of a yet newer version... Still sorta accessible if you hex edit it or open it in a text editor, but to actually run it, you have to figure out how to link it...

You're a hero. I came to the comments specifically to check if anyone had pointed that out, and to request a second pass to see what pressing "A" would do!

@@BenDanielUS Nothing and also the required code it asks for after the backdoor is triggered just waits for 5 keypresses, if my understanding of C isn't that bad.

Everybody, thanks for checking.

I was gonna say. He was this close to retro bright that keyboard. 😂

Holy crap! I didn't know this! I graduated a year earlier (1988) and at Grad Night we got RUN-DMC (which were fine), buy I would have rather had InSoc... Ah well...

I actually can’t make a PC disk image currently anyway 😊

@@8_Bit Don't start. 👍

I disagree with the instead. I wouldn't be surprised if there's hidden information somewhere on the disk, and having access to a disk image would allow one to look for it.

Not sure how to do it in windows, in linux you'd just use the cp command on the /dev/fd0 or /dev/sdwhatever device it shows up as to a file. Although there's far more ridiculous methods like kryoflux and greaseweasel which allow for a more forensic level analysis of the disk surface but since this was a mass produced piece of software, it probably just started blank then had whatever needed to be written to it written to it, so I wouldn't expect anything hidden on it at the analog level, unless this band was just that deep in to easter egg hunts. :D

@@Aeduo there are disk imagers for DOS and Windows. I don't recall the name of any for DOS right now but a popular one for Windows (9x and higher I believe) was Winimage. There are several ports of the dd command for Windows and if I recall correctly even DOS. I would not expect anything intentionally hidden on the disk. However, it's possible the master disk they sent for duplication was a random disk that contains deleted files which still may be wholly or partially present on the disk. Either using a command like undelete on DOS or requiring more manual analysis.

Yes, it seems like C code from a BASIC coder, who is just learning just enough to get the job done.

I'm pretty sure I've seen evidence that they did use C64s, if not Amigas, but I can't find it now :) I was a bit disappointed this was for MS-DOS but still had fun playing around with it, and I'm glad they made it.

Research found: Sex in the House / Sex in the Hood by Connoisseur Records

@@conrad4667 yup, that one.

Exactly what I was thinking

Should have been 11001001, hehe

@@ShamrockParticle Maybe you have a sense of humour I don't get, but I have no idea why you would find \311 ╔ preferable.

Yes, according to the cleaning disk instructions the drops of IPA should be put in the triangular area. It seems to spread throughout the disk. I haven't heard of a floppy drive head getting magnetized but maybe it happens? The two problems I usually see are dirty heads and old/lack of lubrication on the rails that the head slides on. I think this particular model (PC 50-II) shipped with MS-DOS 4.01 installed on the hard drive. I'm currently running v. 5 on it. As far as I know, most/all the Commodore PCs shipped with some form of MS-DOS or Windows 3.x in the case of the very last models. I am curious if there's anything hidden on the disk at the sector level but don't really have the knowledge to investigate myself. I hope to have the means to image the disk at a low level soon, and then I'll get someone more knowledgeable to look at that.

To my knowledge, no Commodore PC had DOS built-in. The earliest models were shipped with MS-DOS 2.11 on disk.

Indeed, the braces should be indented the same as the conditionals and function headers and all on their own line. This is just weird with the trailing brace on the last line, the opening brace indented extra and yet on its own line.

It's not just that the answer isn't available, but even the existence of the disk (or puzzle) itself is almost entirely unrecorded. I suppose that does help it stay secret though!

You can also crack the code via looking at the actual code And looking for the text the program is actually looking for. And then just writing that down.

Indeed. 23:45 for details of fake errors.

Sometimes it can be useful! But yeah I've mostly only found use for it to break out early in some kind of initialization or loading in some data to various locations within a bunch of code at the bottom of a function that can clean things up. Kinda a workaround to C not having destructors.