8 Bit Underground

review to be posted soon.

Well its been about 2 months now that the blog has been alive. From watching the hit tracker it appears there is at least a small amount of interest in what I am doing here – though I assumed there would have been at least some spam comments posted by now.. Don’t worry though, I am not discouraged at all by the response. As a matter of fact, the past two months of delving back into 8 bit computing and the underground of yesterday has really been somewhat healing for me in some odd way.

With that said – the next several months will be a challenge. I have a few things going on in real life, as well as the task of categorizing, documenting, and presenting as much 8bit underground propaganda to you as I possibly can – and the amount of information that I have to place online is beginning to grow beyond even my own expectations – though sadly not much of it is Atari related.

Either I am just not looking in the right places – or it seems like the Atari underground related stuff – especially hacker/phreaker stuff (programs) just didn’t make it to the new millennium with all of the c64/128 and apple stuff that did.

I will keep my fingers crossed though and continue to badger as many collectors as I can with the hopes that among their 1450XLD’s, and 3.5″ XF551’s that there lies some box, wardialer, and long distance code scanners from yesterday that will only run on my beloved Atari 8bit series of computers.

I will most likely update the blog again with an “on topic” post this coming weekend – but I just wanted to drop a note of thanks this evening.

Well I put this blog up to be a site for those of us who are melancholy over the old school underground with an emphasis on the applications we used on 8/16 bit computers but so far I’ve not placed any of the promised reviews of those apps online.

Today that all changes, and I figured I would start things off with what I consider to be one of the best of the best of this breed of utility, Phone Man for the Commodore 64/128.

So without further delay, lets get on with review number one on 8bit underground. Please note that the actual download of this application for emulation will be provided on this sites forums which are located here.

Click here to read the review…

At his age, there wasn’t a whole lot going on the night before Christmas. His brothers had both gone out to hang out with friends and discuss what they would be getting for Christmas and drinking rum and cokes. In their eyes, a fine Christmas morning would be to find a new Stratocaster, or Holley Double Pumper carburetor under the tree.

But not him. No, he sat in his bedroom, the dull glow of the nineteen inch TV screen casting long shadows as he took another gulp from his two liter bottle of Coke.

But it wasn’t Max Headroom or Back to the Future cast across the screen – it was the user interface to TUFF Hacker by The Underground Fone Federation, and it was running on his Atari 800XL computer complete with disk drive. TUFF Hacker was a code scanner – a program that would dial a long distance carrier number, wait for a dial tone and then enter a code followed by a known carrier number. If the program detected carrier then it knew that the code was good and it would log it to file to be (ab)used later.

The only problem was that he had no modem.

Click here to read more…

I won’t post too many “progress” posts as I feel they are somewhat redundant and also progress really means more to me as the person who is putting this blog/forum/resource together. But after spending some time in my Atari emulator this evening I have gotten some of the ATR files that had been provided to me to work.

As of right now, I have successfully at least partially been able to execute the following Atari Underground Apps, which I have not seen in nearly 23 years.

• TUFF Hacker
• Lightning Hacker
• Wizardry Seeker

TUFF Hacker was especially fun to see again as that was an application that I used heavily. Unfortunately the version that I was given is not the version I remember as it is a rewrite by someone other than the original author – Tracker. Even still though, it was a blast from the past and really made me happy to be putting this project together.

I truly hope that google searches and word of mouth will eventually bring more of the programs I remember for the Atari from the underground world of yesterday. There was never as much in the way of hacking/phreaking apps for the Atari 8-Bit as there was the c64/128, but there was certainly a good share of it, and I’m sure many more that I never saw.

With that said, I’m pondering of taking another step into this and actually putting together a database using something like Adobe Flex with a simple XML backend to catalog and present as many details of each of the apps that I find for the various platforms. It will be tedious for the Apple 2 and c64/128, but I think in the long run worth it not only for my own satisfaction but also for those who might stumble across the site.

More to come soon.

This is not your son’s Internet.

This is the 8 Bit Underground.