Line of Fire

Richard Aplin was annoyed at how Sega would not let him put any credits in the game Line of Fire, so created this amusing startup-sequence:

Line Of Fire was written by Richard Aplin for Creative Materials &
U.S. Gold from July-November 1990.

;Dear Cracker,
;To save you time, simply fill in the appropriate lines below..

type "Line Of Fire!
type " Cracked by the utterly amazing and fab _________ of _______!"
type "Hot greets to _____ and _____!!"
type "Lamings and slaggings to _____ of _____ and _____!!!"
type "Call our BBSs on ____-______ and ____-______ for the latest warez!"
type ""
type "I am a sad and immature spotty little twat because _______________."
type "I crack games for free as I have no friends"
type "and am physically repulsive to females because of my chronic _______."
type "I hate my parents because they _____ and make me tidy me room even"
type "when I have been at kindergarten the whole day."
type ""
type "I have played with myself ____ times in the past 24 hours"
type "and have wet dreams about ________ from Neighbours."
type ""
type "The last Kylie Minogue record I brought was ________ and I think"
type "she's lush and fab and ace and wicked because she's _________ and I"
type "fancy her."
type ""
type "Press right button for trainer, left for normal.     Probably."
Crap_Demo_That_Crashes_Half_The_Time_And_Has_A_Sprite_Starfield_Oh_How_Original
run Corrupt_loads_of_memory_all_over_the_place
Game







*****************************************************************************
*If you are under 14 or have a Datel Action Replay, you may not read further*
*****************************************************************************






Right that's that over with.





Firstly....
For those who might possibly be interested, rather than those who just want
to hack the program to bits....

Sega wouldn't let us have ANY credits on the game, so I thought we might
as well put some here.

I (Richard Aplin) wrote the Amiga and ST versions (though at the time of 
writing - 12th Nov.1990 - I haven't started the ST conversion yet!)
I much prefer the Amiga (doesn't anyone?) so I have done that version
first, using all the extra hardware, then i'm going to bang out the
ST version when necessary.


"Uncle Art" (actually a limited company!) did the (not very good) music.
- Oh yeah.. Apologies and sympathy to Uncle Tom (the person!) for the
fuck up with his amazing Double Dragon II music!


The bitmap graphics were grabbed from the arcade PCB video output by Andy Heike
and Nick Vincent with the colour frame grabber, and the sprites were read,
decoded and converted from the arcade machine's Eproms by me. (Not a bit
of bloody help from Sega either!)   They were remapped from 21 million to 16
colours by Andy Heike, Nick Vincent, and some students in Manchester.

I sampled the sound effects from the PCB's sound chip (not very hard at all!)

Tiertex wrote the protection check code (which is utter shit - well on form
for Tiertex!)

Steve Fitton and Tony Porter from U.S. Gold provided all the nagging and
hassle which was most unwelcome, but kind of expected anyway.




During the writing of this, I used:

Work
====
3 Commodore A500s
21Mb A590 Hard Disk + 2.5Mb ram
Commodore A1000 + 2Mb ram
Tandon 20Mhz 80386 PC + 40Mb Hard Disk
Souped-up JCL Colourpic video frame-grabber
PerfectSound sampler
Some custom EPROM-reading hardware I built to read the arcade board's roms.
Atari 1040ST (yuk)
+Various extra drives, disks, etc,etc
Lots of coffee

Fun (Notice how the two are divided?!?)
===
Nintendo GameBoy (+Tetris & others)
Sega MegaDrive (+Ghouls'n'ghosts, etc)
Mr.Do! arcade board
Hundreds of records, tapes & CDs and a {<(|loud|)>} stereo
Sony Video Walkman (+Blackadder 1-4, Comic Strip, Young Ones, and others)
Roland D110 multi-timbral LA synth (rackmount)
Cheetah MS6 multi-timbral analogue synth (rackmount)
Yamaha TX7 FM synth (stupidly-shaped black box)
Casio FZ1 16-bit sampler + loads of disks
Alesis Quadraverb 16-bit digital fx processor (rackmount)
Fender Strat guitar (well, a cheap clone)
A couple of guitar fx pedals
DeskTech 6:2 mixer
MicroIllusions Music-X sequencer (Amazing program)
Virtually no musical talent/ability whatsoever
US Robotics Courier HST modem (for P.D. BBSs of course)
Many gallons of beer, Black Bush whisky, Potheen (when available - cheers Mark!)
Various people's floors/sofas/etc in London when at computer shows 
 (most time spent at the bar)