Utilities

Excellent all-purpose linker & packer (compresses up to 32 files in the $0002-$00FA / $01C3-$FFFF memory area). Gained world-wide notoriety for the user interface in the 2.0 version that was later used in the LevelSqueezer series.

Obsolete version. Included for historical reasons.

Much improved version. Features the well-known userinterface.

A DolphinDos optimized V2.0 by Scratch/Triangle

As more and more games became "multiloaders" something had to be done to crunch the additional files - and to load them without owerwriting any of the memorylocations not used by the individual files. And so another byproduct of the cracking era saw the light of day: the level-packer. This type of program (normally) has very good compression, a linker to compress a number of source files into one target file, and a short loader/depacker that can easily be relocated to run in any memory location. All a cracker had to do was to install the depacker in a bit of unused memory somewhere in the game, point to the name of the compressed file, and call the routine. Naturally, Levelpackers soon became very valuable to crackers and groups often kept their customized packers to themselves.

Good levelpacker for "home" and "semi-professional" use.
Features the well known menu system, good compression, and a $01B0 bytes depacker.
(C)1989 TCD/Triangle

Datacompression was something of a science to many people. If the source data was pre-processed before final crunching took place quite a lot of space could be saved. This process had many names: Run Length Encoding (or simply RLE), Equal Char packing (or Charpacking). Whatever name this algorithm is known by it has one function: replace sequences of equal bytes with compressed data.
Having a good charpacker wasn't enough for some people, and in 1990 Scratch discovered that the 1987 packer "EBC 1.2" had quite a bit of potential. It soon became my pet-project, and after a few basic modifications I reverse-engineered the packer, gradually rewriting all of it, adding a more userfriendly frontend, as well as better compression.
Less than 10 copies of the EBC V1.9 were ever spread, all of them branded, and sent out seperately by myself.

Original version.
(C)1987 SOMA Laboratories.

Shorter depacker
Stackpointer option removed.
Relocate target option added.
(C)1990 Scratch/Triangle

Bugfix
(C)1990 Scratch/Triangle

Shorter depacker.
Added additional crunchcode for 4-byte sequences.
(C)1991 Qed/Triangle

Bugfix.
Major improvement to crunchcode scanner.
(C)1991 Qed/Triangle

Manual Crunchcode select dropped.
Source file start address option dropped.
New userinterface added.
(C)1991 Qed/Triangle

Analyzes the source file and uses one of two packing algorithms.
Shorter depacker
(C)1991 Qed/Triangle

Bugfix.
100% rewritten scan-routine
Shorter depacker
(C)1991 Qed/Triangle

Continuing the search for better compression soon resulted in a level-version of the EBC. Just like it's cousin the conventional charpacker, this one was designed specifically for pre-processing data. Features a short depacker that can easily be woven into the levelcruncher's depacker.

(C)Qed/Triangle

(C)Qed/Triangle

(C)Qed/Triangle

As opposed to many of the password-scramblers on the C64 the "Password Protector" series uses timers & raster-positions to encrypt/decrypt the data - making it very hard to crack. The disadvantage to this approach is that a file encrypted on one machine may not decode successfully on another.

First version using timers.
(C)1990 Qed/Triangle

Uses even more timers than the previous version.
(C)1990 Qed/Triangle

Uses timers, rasterposistion, screen on/off and "bad"-line displacement. Compared to the earlier versions this is the hairy one . :)
(C)1991 Qed/Triangle
Additional ideas and code by Spot/Triangle
Debugging hints by Scratch/Triangle

Being a cracker could be quite a challenge. Defeating a copy-protection was a battle of wits, and some opponents were more worthy than others. While breaking the same old routine over and over again would certainly be easy, it would also quickly become tedious. To ease the process of transferering original tapes to disk many crackers coded transfer-utilities for various loaders.

Used to transfer the first "autostart" file on a original tape.

Like "Re-Loader V1.0", only different. :)

Some parameters in the Hewson loader differs from time to time. This program uses an "intelligent" two-pass scan to decrypt the scrambled loader and transfer the data to disk.