8 Bit Underground

In a bold, shocking new move b.8bu.com, we create a message post that does not conform to the typical text wrapping of the message around the image as every single other post has up until today. why? because I thought the header image so cool that I did not want to make it so small as to be unreadable. where did it come from you may ask – i will leave your googling skills to make that determination.

this post is simply being shown as an appetizer on an upcoming series i will be doing that discusses various devices and how they work as far as telephone number analysis (scanning, call progress detection, dtmf creation/generation, etc). most interesting to me at least is that the review will include several “telephony devices”, not just modems. i will use the first device reviewed to develop the framework for te others. hopefully real life stuff will allow me to do this before summer gets here.

as an added bonus i will be.doing these reviews using several methods of connectivity (magic jack, sip providere, aix providers, etc).

review to be posted soon.

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…

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.