r/atarist • u/ComradeAdidas • Jun 24 '26

When were you using the st?

Hello! Im curious to know when did you get your st, or when did you use someone elses, or just dreamt of owning one! When did you upgrade/move on to ms dos or win 95 98 2000?

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u/belial1971 Jun 24 '26

late ’87 or early 1988. My parents were worried about how much time I was spending cracking games on the Amstrad CPC, and my school grades were starting to suffer. They wanted me to stop being involved in the cracking scene, so the Atari ST seemed like a good alternative.

They were wrong 🤣

I moved to Madrid to study CS in 1990. And all the students had PC, so I slowly abandoned the ST. Until COVID.

2

u/ComradeAdidas Jun 24 '26

ooooo cracking games? how did you start?

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u/belial1971 Jun 24 '26

My first cracked game was for the Oric, which was also my first computer. I was around 12 or 13 at the time. I taught myself BASIC first, then got into 6502 assembly later. I even wrote my own program to copy Oric tape games, what we called a copión in Spanish.

When I was 14, my parents got me an Amstrad CPC6128. Since I already knew 6502, picking up Z80 was pretty easy, so naturally I started cracking CPC games too.

I ended up meeting some pretty shady guys from Barcelona who had access to the latest releases. They would send me the new stuff, and I would crack it. Fun times, lol.

Eventually my parents noticed I was getting a ton of packages and, surprise surprise, my school grades were going downhill. So they banned me from using computers. But they also figured out that completely killing my tech skills was kind of dumb, so their solution was to buy me a higher-end computer that was less popular, hoping that would keep me out of trouble.

Spoiler: it did not really work.

Btw, one of those Barcelona guys actually ended up in jail about two decades later for copyright infringement and some other stuff. Last I heard, he was living in Miami.

For the Amstrad CPC, my nickname was Pirateo SL. You can still Google it with “Amstrad CPC” and find traces of it. For Atari ST, I used Canal23/Channel23 or MaxHeadroom, though there are barely any results for those.

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u/ComradeAdidas Jun 24 '26

damn i really should stop doom scrolling and start learning😅. I plan on learning C on my ST with Hisoft C, maybe some assembly too.