X-Copy and Piracy on The Commodore Amiga 

yeahhhhh

Yes!¡!!!! Such a great feeling! I still remember my first copy, sensible soccer.

Drat, I got a red '1', let's try 'deep nibble' mode.

Feeling like jack-the lad cos you had a 'Cumana' external floppy drive.

Yeah Haaaaaa What a lift up .... used Dcopy myself

I read in a computer magazine (back in the day) that the true sign of a quality disc copy program was it!s ability to copy it self!, and yes xcopy passed that test

You copied your X-Copy disks? That's one of the tools i would never backup.... to me, it was an "exception"

makes sense..Copy the copier

I had 4 different versions of xcopy on one disk. I don't think they were genuine updates.. just cracking crews modifying the ui. Sacrilege I know but I always preferred d copy.. lol

Shit is real ❤️

What's the second rule?

on MS-DOS pc there was Diskcopy but it was not effective for copying non-standard formatted disk, which what copy protected softwares/games uses. That being said MS-DOS's diskcopy existed for few years before Amiga's X-Copy became available.

@@judgewest2000 buy a second disk drive lol

Don't copy that floppy! Heh.

@ It is a personal computer. ;) PC = Personal computer

Reminds me of what happened with State Of Decay.

Paul- it was different times though I think - if you could do it - you did. you had to learn how to. Not like today with youtube giving you the basics. I say fair play.

We've spoken to journalists who used to write "piracy is bad folks" articles on pirate copies of word processors. As you say, it was very widespread.

PD libraries too I buy some PD disks to a library i see on a local magazine and started to recibe a catalog with all the amiga soft for about 1 euro the disk

Paul Robinson in no way has the "piracy industry" disappeared, the The sites have all gone private. Actually this all started with people figuring out back doors into company and industry FTP servers and stashing a few hundred gigabytes of warez there. Then if you were lucky you could get the login and download whatever "0 Day" they had. Because some of the software was so large it was compressed into zip files and then those zip files were added to an RAR archive. Then it was distributed in a span of about 20 or so 5 to 10 MB files. And then the peer 2 peer sites happened, they no longer needed to break in to a corporate server, The wares could be shared right from home PCs using the same torrents. Pirate Bay was king for a long time, but then it became a lot of underground, private websites where you have to be invited to get in. people no longer need to compress the media or software or whatever they are sharing into RAR archives, when there are about a dozen people sharing the same large files, they come in very rapidly over broadband connections. But what is funny about this is that there are still people who do compress their "releases", exe files to a zip span to an RAR archive to another zip span and then RARed again. It's like it has become a tradition. Oh, and then they will put a password one of the archives just to make it more difficult. I knew a couple of guys on a BBS, back before broadband, they ran an outfit out of their house using Amigas. interesting operating system.

I guess the pain that all my disks were not really all originals softens the blow. How many could actually say "I have 1000+ games all origional and not a single pirated disk was along them?"

Emulators, my friend.

I still smart, after lending my 1200 to my mate then he died, and his family cleared out everything before I could get it back, fantastic memories from my amiga day's.

@@zoomintrackout1 I use WinUAE, it works fine. But it's not the same. It's about touch, smell, form, everything...

@ I know how you feel, I made the same mistake years ago too. For this reason, in 2003 I bought myself an A600 (before that I had the A500 just like you). Believe me, the emulator will not replace a real computer. It's damn comfortable and fast but it's not the same. Look for used Amiga 500/600, you will find something in good money :) Greetings from Krakow ;)

ahahah Miss those saturdays!! towers and towers of drilled 3,5" ;) I also got my expansion for PoP and Magic Johnson's Basketball :P And those that came with external drives got more cake :D Bless my mom for putting up with all of them around! miss it all tbh. For the haters I wasn't rich to have much hence i had some copied games. To have the A500 my parents worked really hard and took them ages to pay it! I thank them for the life they gave me and to help me became the Network Guru Meditator I am today. Haters may hate but we were Happy! We didnt kill the scene... Greed from Commodore and developers did!

The first time a friend and I played Monkey Island 2 (was it only 9 disks?) we got quite far in the game and were totally into it - until one disk turned out to be a bad copy, and we had to call another friend who had a copy of the game to see if was home (he was), and then get on our bikes and race down to his place, copy the disk, race back home, and finally continue the game. Those were the days!

I remember playing civilization and depending on what disk the games wanted me to insert I knew what event was likely to happen even before I saw the screen.

I haven't lived.

And then the 8th disk has a read error, just at the end of the game :D

Can you remember the other colours x copy was coping the disk to a new disks

I miss those times. When the word got around the playground that the new kid had an Amiga! You may not become best mates, but it like the schoolboys version of the Freemasons LOL....

That's exactly what it was like where I lived. I got my Amiga when I was 15 and suddenly I found myself talking and sharing discs with all sorts! School friends, friends of friends, some were complete strangers to me! It became a sharing network with discs being shared and copied regularly. I even later got to find out who was doing the downloading from BBS's which was such a rarity for the time! But once they had the game or demo the news would travel like wildfire! The other big thing for the time was the competition and rivalry between ST and Amiga owners! The Amiga almost always won a playground argument though!

I had a lot of A500 games - the only legitimate discs I had was the Workbench and Extras discs=P It's a shame, really. I wish games and software were cheaper to begin with, so people wouldn't have such a strong incentive to pirate.

The first game i pirated.

One of the many Amigas I obtained in recent years came with a *huge* collection of floppies. An entire shelf holds some of the disk boxes, but most are in the attic. :D

Same here, even in Auckland it was almost impossible to get Amiga games, and if you did find them (there was a shop on Symonds Street that usually had a decent range) they were insanely expensive - well over $100 and this was back in the early 90's - so that was a lot of money. I ended up with 4 double row boxes of floppies, plus piles in the Verbatim plastic boxes you got with a 10 pack. NOt sure that had anything to do with being cool though! Maybe among my fellow nerd friends...

I don't think the copy scene for the Atari ST or Amiga were as cool or as in-depth as with the 8-bit Commodore and Atari computers. The Happy Drive mod - including clones and competitors - is still considered to be holy in the Atari 8-bit scene even to this day...

We don't overwrite... we cherish them forever.. except me, who goes by "Why should i view something 10,0000+ times?". It's like psychical books.. If you haven't got the space, don''t read them, you'd sell them.. The same, I'd imagine is true with Amiga games as well.. Floppy disks can only take soo much beating.... but i'd still do it if nothing else, than just because i needed floppies to use.. Why would i waste money with brand new?

That's almost as better as being ""The Keyboard Warrior"

Kim Mortensen This does not apply to software.

Same in the Netherlands it is called thuiscopieheffing. this means tax for coping at home although I think this only applies to movies and music. Next year usb sticks will be taxed too, I know mine will come from ebay or alibaba.

we have a tax like that on blank media in France as well, been in place for about 15yrs now. but it's by no means a "right to copy protected stuff" law, quite the contrary, it is simply repaid to the SACEM (local equivalent of the RIAA which defends the rights of all affiliates, music, movie or software editors) to compensate for the damage piracy is doing to the businesses. Whether it succeds or not (and whether it is fair for people who don't use blank media for copying intellectual property) is debatable...

In italy too.. But nobody talk about that no more. In italy we used to pay useless taxes without protests

its the same deal in the netherlands even on mp3players usb flash drives. To bypass the extra expence I ordered blank cd's and dvd's in luxemburg were they did't have a extra fee.

Yup. Beyum, every three weeks. It was the follow up to a C64 users club, where a similar scene could be observed. Except, Fast Hack'em would be running on the screens on the C64 club weekends :)

What a great idea that was. My school used Acorn computers which did run some games very similarly to the Amiga, Lemmings was one of them. Having an Amiga club so members could get together and copy games was a brilliant idea, that must have been great.

That's right. Been there many times . Internet wasn't avaible back then. Took my amiga with me . And it was a great way to meet other people.!

I'm also Dutch and I didn't even know you could legally buy games until the early 2000s. My dad and my uncles would all copy everything. Was a great time though. My oldest uncle is 80 years now and he still plays video games every day like gta 5. it all started with amiga.

drunkensailor112 yeah it was a fantastic time. The only game I actually bought was Robocop 2 ,because I couldn't wait . Loved the box though... Great to hear your uncle still plays games . Proves your never to old.. 😄

Nice!

Remember you back in the day haha, do you remember the Pompei Pirates discs ?

@G1zm0 abizmo Actually you are correct I had both the ST and the Amiga. Funnily enough I think I remember Zippy too he was way up north if its the guy im thinking of.

the good old days.... I ran /x for quite too on theTigers Claw BBS, I was up for a few years I think the 'Shuttle' was one of the last UK boards running

Did you look like the kids in Hackers? :D

I guess it was called TetraCopy.

Correct

i had that , another i used was called d copy

Rattlecopy was great, too..

those floppy hypnotic sounds really had my memory on 'pause.' I couldn't think of gaming sometimes, let alone playing games while it was copying.

About 20% of the time :) Games had to be cracked and custom boot sectors written for the vast majority of games to be copied.

Nibble copy was excellent to use on disks that bad tracks, or was damaged, as it often was able to save the data to a new disk.

Not Dungeon Master tho!

there were disks you just could not copy...... i had a few.. Protects are better toady, but while it was eaiser on the Amiga, the protection was pretty good too.

Most times i tend to think, at a time, some shop owners wanted to make a profit, so they copied the game, and sold that, while keeping the original disk for themselves., (while charged the same price on the copy) That way they would get an original for their own, and also profit from some poor sucker. Or even carefully cover labels covering the original, to make it look genuine..

All that free software availability meant a lot of hardware sales, which drove down the chip costs... So we were doing the future a big service by blazing away with X-copy, White Lightning and Nibble copy! :D

You raise a good point - the companies wanted everyone to pay for games but their marketing & distribution sucked! If they put more effort into making legit games available they may have had more sales!

sharing comes first right ? 😇

oh yes

Tak tak tak wrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrwwww tak wrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrwwwww wrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrwww tak tak wrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrwwwnn read/write error.

ö. . , Yeah... I can't say I miss those fragile things. Still have an Amiga, but it's all flash & optical storage. Peace at last

30 tracks?

I should've known someone was going to count them ;)

Larry Bundy Jr in 2000, shortly after we got a new PC, which had a CD writer, my mom offered to get the PlayStation chipped to play copied games but I said no! Not because the Dreamcast had become our main console by that point (the same trip to PC World we bought that computer my parents let me have a Dreamcast Vibration Pack!) but because I have a big disdain for piracy! I still remember the "Piracy is cool?" letter published in CVG 2 and a half years prior!

Hard disk installable games didn't have copy protection. the ones that did have copy protection tended to be those on bootable floppies only.

@@adultmoshifan87 Yeah, you clearly never lived in the dark ages, my friend. No offence, I agree that you should pay for your software. But when you live in a world where the nearest shop that even sold video games is a 3 hour train trip, that your parents would never let you make (rightfully so), and the lifeblood of new games is the playground? Yeah, sorry. Let's just say I'm not going to spend 4-5 years of my childhood playing 3 games. Oh, and 2 of those games you can finish in under an hour ;)

@@RogueBoyScout There was a Woolworths in my town at the time! It was where we bought Ecco The Dolphin: Defender of The Future! There was also a Blockbuster in another nearby town, where we bought Manx TT and Fighters Megamix, and an Electronics Boutique in another town just an hour's drive away, where we bought Bust A Move 2!

@@RogueBoyScout Similar here... But to be honest: The first decade of my computering I didn't even know games were something you can buy. I had hundreds of hand written disks and x-copied everything I could get my hands on in circle with my friends. The first time a saw an original computer game box was... mind blowing! ^^

Simon Thompson And it was so satisfying when the copy finished and all the lights were green. With the quality of most of the games available copying the game was often more satisfying than playing it.

I had friends who bought computers just because they could get so many games. When I sold mine I had 4000 floppy disks. For a long time after I'd keep finding them. I think floppy disks bred if you left them alone long enough.

pkaulf I've always believed this. a lot of people probably wouldn't have owned an Amiga, PSX, xbox 360 if I they thought they had to buy all the software.

Dry Dessert The Amiga Action Replay was Amazing!!

The HD enclosure you're referring to sounds like the one I had, a GVP. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-SbttGlYQu-w.html

@@Autos389 Yes! That's the one, thanks! I loved that case, it fit the look of the A500 perfectly. out of all the Amigas, I wish I still had that old A500 with this HD. So many good memories with it. I had a 50meg HD on it I think was the size and I remember when I digitized my first song, it was Mr. Roboto and it took over 40megs! LOL, could just do that one song. I ran a BBS on it for a while. Anyhow, thanks for the reminder, I forgot which one it was until now. Hard to believe it was so long ago, I was 27 at the time... some... 30 years ago? Yikes...

@@NeilRoy I, too, was a similar age (I'm 56 now) and had an A500. I remember when I got that first SCSI hard drive for my GVP - a 52MB bare drive cost me over $500! Good times...

I remember laughing my butt of as a kid when I first heard that song. And watching this video, I was going to comment on if anyone knew which copy program played it. Suffice to say, when I heard that song again, the 13 year old in my grinned like a cheshire cat. I used to sing it all the time in my bad days pirating movies 'n music. Today, I just cough up the dough. As a single bachelor, I figure no wife, no kids, I can at least pay my way for being a social failure.

It could do that I'm sure but usually it'd copy the entire disk into memory incase - as was often the case - you might want to make more than one copy of the disk.

Ah, yes, of course. :)

I'd feel safer with direct copy... Although it would take more time,,, memory can get corrupted too at that time

I don't even remember the word pirate being used back in late 80s and early 90s

Software piracy during the 80:s and 90:s was meaning exactly the same thing. The only difference is the distribution medium. It used to be by bulletin boards (somewhat similar to todays original uploader) and mostly spreading it by diskcopying where today it is almost 100% from the net. Back in the day it was very much talked about in magazines. Take Steinberg Cubase on the Atari ST in 1989 for example. When it first was released it was a sensation. But it was also cracked and that was a reoccurring talking point in the monthly electronic music magazines of the day. A couple of years later (still in the mid 90:s perhaps) it was mentioned as one of the reasons to put Steinberg (With Cubase) on the map, so that up and coming producers was used to the workflow and bought some software later on. I never saw or heard of anybody making money from cracked software back then. come to think of it, the only time I have heard about it is from friends visiting Asian countries in the early 2000:s where they could by cheap pirated CD:s. But never during the 80:s and 90:s in western Europe, although pirate copying (non-software) always existed (again very much in Asia) and still do.

Yep, i still use directory opus on my win 10 machine :)

Yes. Directory Opus. That program and the Amiga was THE BEST. And Cygnus Ed. I did buy DOpus for my PC here a while back and do use it. Nothing like the original.

I always preferred Disk Master, especially V2, to Dir Opus. DO had a lot of features, but all the buttons took up too much room unless you used a hi-res screen and then it flickered. DM had more room for the file lists and with V2, you could pretty much customize the whole thing.

I still use Directory Opus on PC. It happens to still be the best file manager in the world. I pirated every Dopus then, I have a yearly licence now but it is still too expensive. That's the problem with software on PC, it's mostly too expensive. Games get it, they're cheap enough that we can all buy them now no matter what your budget is. £4000 for a 3D renderer that needs that much spending on it again for the right addons? Yeah that's still fricken ludicrous. The music scene is just as bad with horribly over priced sequencers and plug-ins.

i used to use DirWork way more then i used Dir. Opus... because it was much slimmer and yet similar customizable functionality

Help kill off the Amiga?! On the contrary, just like with Windows 3.11, it would NEVER been so popular without the copying. The "hometaping is killing music!" and "you wouldn't downlo0ad a car" falls into the same fallacy: that the value of a copy is of equal value of a sale... so using their calculation model, The Pirate Bay had about 6-8 times the planet's collective GDP passing through on annual basis... which of course is ridiculous. Truth of the matter is that there is a limited amount of money to be collected, and piracy has very little impact on that amount. Looking at the music industry today, the publishers have increased their profits by taking a much higher cut now when distribution is very cheap compared to before, when production and distribution of physical media was a major part of the total expenses.

The games I had would NEVER been bought, because I was a kid with no money. As it was, I had to beg my parents to give money to buy the Amiga (which helped Commodore stay in business)

Amiga died when Commodore died, and they died because they were spending more money than they earned. Same thing happened to Atari and Apple. (Except Apple avoided bankruptcy when Steve Jobs got a loan from Bill Gates.)

I still have xcopy in the original box and for some reason two hardware dongles which I never installed. Later I often used a copy program which ran from the workbench started from HD. Probably also had the option to start automatically as soon as two disks were inserted...

I’m bad

Everyone had to deal with piracy back then. If you think the cartridges were immune you're wrong. While the cartridges were a lot less affected, but not immune (remember the clones, unauthorized game collections etc) the cartridges themselves had a lot more expensive parts like chips etc. The problem with Amiga and Atari was that they thought they were established while clearly they weren't. So competitors caught them on their sleep.

@@perseusarkouda which has what to do with Oscar's comment?

@@Luthiart lol no idea, probably replied to the wrong post.

I think The 8-bit Guy did one

yeah, there's plenty of, search for "amiga repair", "amiga restoration", "amiga battery leak", ... oh, lol, I even did one myself: search for "amiga alive keyboard repair" :-)

Don't you mean "Blitter regret"? That is, unless you had a Mega ST, STe, or Falcon... :)

Commodore's bad business sense is what killed Amiga. The Amiga was a wonderful, capable computer when it arrived, but Commodore failed to evolve the product. Slashing R&D meant everything Commodore did after 1987-88 was years too late. In the meantime, the PC caught up and surpassed it on the gaming front.

Also Motorola couldn't compete too long against Intel.

@@davidvincent380 Motorola didn't have a unified platform to gain sales momentum. You had Atari and Commodore battling each other tooth-and-nail and both also fighting against Apple. Users on 3 separate platforms then also facing off against the WinTel red tide. It was like the monolithic mediocre VHS obliterating BetaMax all over again. But as much fault as I find with Intel's products, they certainly have pumped in a ton of money into manufacturing, unlike the graveyard filled with their historic competitors.

Dazed - There'll be plenty of videos on RU-vid about CRT repair, but be careful; the voltages are potentially lethal even when it's been unplugged for hours or days, and will need to be discharged to ground. I think the most common issue is usually capacitors that have dried out, but if I were you I'd find a local repair man (or woman!).

Dazed What you are describing is the high voltage from the flyback literally arcing somewhere inside the chassis of the monitor. Repairing such a thing is certainly possible, but ill advised for most and best left to someone familiar with CRT repair and high voltage safety practices. :)

Thanks for the reminder guys, I do recall getting a zap from the anode on a big old brown TV as a kid. Luckily I didn't flyback (hoho). I might discharge it & look with some marigolds on. Some FAQs mentioned cleaning the dust & using silicone sealant to fix arcing, but otherwise I'll look for bad caps or solder joints. There's a scuff so maybe it got bashed going up the loft ladder. I've got my old A500+ without a modulator, but an unwired DB23? RGB plug came with it so I'll try making a SCART lead first. I'd made one for my Speccy ZX +2 but it gets double vision on my Samsung LCD, yet is fine on our Sony.

Piracy created the amigas dominance in the 90s you think 10% of the machine gets sold with no piracy? You needed to get more friends as a kid imo

Six of one, current gen hasn't got the capability yet anyway console wise but I would use it previous gens for games that were rare or not sold here though still bought things like imported rpgs for my collection, these days I just have such a backlog of pc games theres no point though I don't have much problem with say cracking dlc for a game I paid especially if its something like extra costumes for a fighting game which are just cosmetic.

Brian Froeber well done! I spent the same for 512k extra ram in order to play Dungeon Master, worth every penny.

I think you're wrong there. Piracy sold more hardware. Every pirate I knew had a real game collection too. No gamers shelves were full of just pirated stuff. There was something special about the big box. Later on when big boxes were replaced by tiny jewel cases, I still bought those sometimes but they weren't special anymore. By then I could print my own covers. They didn't look as good but they were fun to do. The big box was more like an album cover. People loved them for the art and of course the manuals that you really needed for flight sims and such. Piracy is still just as rife as it ever was only today you can pirate on a massive scale. And yet we have a booming gaming industry on PC that's bigger than its ever been.

I'd reply in detail if it weren't so late.... piracy may have sold hardware but it didn't sell software... No software = no hardware.

I think it did sell software too. if you bought the hardware because there was this piracy scene that meant you could have more games. Now parents, grandparents etc. are going to buy you a game or two. You'll buy that one game because you need the manual. You'll buy this other game because you love the developers. The more you get into a scene, the more you understand it, the more likely you are to buy. I had plenty of bought games. As much as a regular console owning gamer would have. I bought the machines for creative reasons rather than games so I'm not a good example of buying for free games but most people bought hardware for that reason and then grew a paid collection anyway.

+Clay Mann: I'm not sure that I believe that as: people use to getting something for free, that easily accessible to them, balk at spending money on such. While it's true that family/friends might buy legit software the odds and the money thrown in their direction will be severely limited. Look, I'm not saying that I never pirated a game BUT I will say that I feed the industry MORE because I truly loved the machine and STILL have all the games, magazines and hardware (sans 1 A500 that was "broken" but I still wish I kept . At the same time, I also discarded any copied games) +Brides of Cthulhu: They kinda are :)

What a load of bollocks. How on earth do you think SOFTWARE piracy made HARDWARE sales unprofitable? It simply didn't - ignoring that Commodore got 0% of third party sales, the Amiga reached the height of its popularity when Commodore went bankrupt. They were flying off of the shelves, with massive software support. The Amiga was simply dragged under the waves when Commodore's financial mismanagement sank them.