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“Sorry about these delayed wares” – and the month-long silence. Here are scans of some documents provided by TMA/Abyss Connection, a German C64 scener who is still active in the demoscene and started his C64 career in the late 1980s, being member of Lazer, Tristar and some other groups of the time.

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After bringing you the first batch of Arny‘s letters a while ago, here is part two. Arny, also known as Icon, is a C64 scener from Austria, active in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a graphics artist and swapper in the groups TSK, Cosmos, and the latter’s game development spin-off Cosmos Designs. This updated features letters he received while being active in Cosmos, and span from 1988 to 1990. Arny maintained a broad network of contacts, ranging from Hungary to Finland.

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We start the new year with another instalment of the Honey/1001 Crew letter collection – namely the letters he received from the British cracking duo Thor & Zeus of Teesside Cracking Service (TCS). TCS was an established C64 group, known and respected well beyond the UK. Coders and crackers Thor & Zeus were known and cherished by their swapping partners for their long and friendly letters. Thus, it’s a real pleasure for us to being able to put some of them online. Stemming from between 1987 and 1988, the correspondence is a treasure trove: not only regarding information on the European C64 elite of that time, but also when it comes to the development both Honey and Thor&Zeus went through during that time – from crackers to professional game developers, while still remaining in touch with the scene.

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Every scene trade – coders, graphics artists, musicians – has its tools. Usually, we think about digital tools in this context. Today, however, we present you some physical tools – the tools of a 1980s C64 swapper. Skylab & General Zoff of The Movers provided us with a bunch of original objects that were crucial to maintain software circulation via floppy disk and “snailmail” – envelopes, express mail stickers, a disk hole puncher, customs forms, and many more.

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First of all, some exciting news: Zippy of The Medway Boys, a legendary Atari ST cracker from the early 1990s, scanned a substantial part of his letter archive for us. These letters will appear here in the very near future. For today, we have chosen a very peculiar document from his collection: A leaflet, approximately from 1992-1993, distributed by commercial software pirates at the notorious Barras street market in Glasgow, Scotland. After one of the usual Christmas time police raids, the announce the end of piracy at the Barras and deliver a lengthy rant against the industry, politics and the media. As Zippy notes, however, “of course they were back the following week as usual”. Something like this is really hard to find, as there is an abundance of voices from scene members of that time, but hardly any from commercial pirates. So, enjoy this historical document! Included is also a contemporary newpaper clipping about the FAST and police investigations against piracy at the Barras.

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Cool stuff, good read. Thanks!

Ahhh nice, best update for Atari ppl so far! :)

Thanks dip. Interesting read. I love how young and "sad" Bill Gates look on that pic. It's like this picture got chosen to show how sad he is to be stolen from "these goddamn pirates"!

robbed*

Again, a batch from the vast collection of Skylab & General Zoff of The Movers. Letters from between 1986 and 1987, some of them quite remarkable – like a scroller draft written on paper by Irata. Enjoy!

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First of all, some exciting news: We received the complete paper archive of the legendary Swiss Cracking Association, Switzerland’s most prominent C64 & Amiga cracking group from the 1980s. Founded in 1984 by two brothers from Zurich, the group’s most (in-)famous stunt was creating and (accidentally) spreading the first Amiga virus, the “SCA Virus“, in late 1987. At that point, however, they already were a well-established cracking and demo group that put Switzerland on the international crackers‘ map and maintained contacts all over the world, until one brother went on to become one of the first Swiss game developers, while the other one moved on to the world of live music. We are very excited and grateful that they handed over their archive to us, which is being scanned right now and will appear here very soon. As a small teaser, today we present one letter from a rather unusual sender – the Zurich customs office, which confiscated two floppy disks and demanded a declaration of the value of the software, not realising that it was a pirate sending, despite the “Plutonium Crackers” tag.

However, I am using this exciting occasion to ask for your help. [PLEASE CLICK ON THE PICTURE TO READ MORE]

As we not only document old crackers‘ letters, but also try to archive the demoscene‘s most recent paper artefacts, here is a bunch of stickers and flyers which circulated at the Revision demoparty, held last weekend in Saarbrücken/Germany, as well as the official Revision info/promo materials kept in this party edition’s airline theme.

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Are you also interested in material which has been created during the making of some demoscene productions?

las, as long as it's physical/material (like paper) - DEFINITELY! mail me!

It's physical material. I just have to find it in the basement.

Here we go again with some old C64 cracker magazines supplied by AVH/Radwar. Some of them have been missing in action, some other have been circulating in lower-quality scans before.

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For those readers who like to see more recent scene-related stuff, and inspired by the Revision demoparty last weekend, I decided to go through the large queue of demoparty-related contributions from the past three years. Here is the result – over 50 demoscene artefacts, contributed by Azzaro, Ctulhu, Dipswitch, and JAL. Enjoy flyers, timetables, writsbands, votekeys etc. from demoparties of the last two decades in a number of countries, from Finland to Hungary, from the USA to Russia. Also, there are some additional flyers and stickers. And next time we’ll be back with 1980s’ letters again.

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As announced a while ago, here is the first installment of the documents from the archive of Swiss Cracking Association, the legendary C64 and Amiga cracking and demo group from Zurich. The core of the group were two brothers: Saturnus the Invincible and Smith the Software Pope. While Saturnus’ responsibility within the group was more on the coding/cracking side – including the crack of “Summer Games” with the hacked-in Swiss anthem, and, of course, the infamous SCA Virus -, Smith tended to focus on the communication side of things. Today, we present you with scans from his stash, including letters from all over the world, as well as a really rare set of internal documents: two versions of SCA’s address list as well as two greeting lists!

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Here is the next instalment of the amazing Swiss Cracking Association papers – with the second batch of the letters received by Smith the Software Pope. This is a large instalment, featuring 63 letters from 1986 to 1988 and including some C64 (and early Amiga) cracking scene legends among the authors. Next time, we will continue with the letters received by Saturnus the Invincible, Smith’s brother and author of the SCA Virus.

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Some copyparty/demoparty materials this time – from the vaults of Acidchild & Bugjam, Arny, Ghost, Jugger, Lance, and Swiss Cracking Association. Included are party invitations from Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Hungary, Switzerland, and Poland. There are some really rare 1980s invitations, including copyparties that are not documented in any scene databases yet – and also some known, yet legendary ones, like the invitation flyer for the first The Party in Denmark in 1991.

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Here we go with the next instalment of the Swiss Cracking Association archive. This time, we bring you the letters received and preserved by Saturnus the Invincible (STI), the older of the SCA brothers, who was one of the very early crackers and coders on the Amiga, programmed the first Amiga virus, and went on to become a game programmer. This batch of letters, encompassing over 120 pages, is a treasure trove for various reasons. Firstly, they document the Amiga scene when the platform was still brand-new, and enthusiasts had to find out step by step how to work with it. Secondly, the years covered here, 1987-1988, were the ones where SCA gained fame and notoriety with their accidentally-spread virus, and here you can see all sorts of reactions that arrived at SCA’s Zurich post box: from an 11-year-old Norwegian boy who wants to get rid of the virus that infected his game collection, to Commodore User journalist Mike Pattenden trying to get in touch with the virus makers. And finally, the letters from 1988-1989 attest to the process of professionalisation that STI underwent, when he began coding games and tools for the Amiga, and received questions for support from “normal” Amiga users as well as correspondence from computer magazines and companies.

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Escaping the heatwave by surfing the net in your cool room? Why not look at old scene documents? Today, we bring you a mix of various paper artefacts from the Amiga, Atari and PC scene, provided by Azzaro, Dipswitch, Gentleman, JAL, Lance, Lotek Style, Thorion, and Willy. Swapletters, wristbands, stickers, flyers, and some unusual stuff.

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Here we go with the next instalment of the SCA archive, this time with another batch of letters received by Saturnus the Invincible (STI). On the one hand, there are some addenda to the 1987-1988 period, when STI was involved in swapping and correspondence primarily as a scener. On the other hand, this update features many letters from the late 1980s and early 1990s, when he focussed on developing Amiga games and tools, and thus received a lot of support requests from ordinary users. A particular highlight is a letter from Commodore Germany to STI’s mother. A lawyer, presumably on behalf of Commodore Germany, had sent STI a cease-and-desist letter related to software swapping. His parents wrote to Commodore Germany, and its legal department clarified that the lawyer had not been commissioned by them and the cease-and-desist letter was null and void.

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Hedning, a prominent figure in nowadays’ C64 scene, started his scene carreer in the early 1990s on the Atari ST platform under the name of Mr. Marvel. Thanks to his old swapping partner Corny, Hedning was able to unearth some of his own old swapletters to him. They are from around 1992 and in Swedish – yet Hedning provided his own translations of the letters into English. You can find them in the /swapletters/corny/ dir of our archive – just click on the files and the translations will appear in the respective metadata sheet.

Also, there is a small addition to the Swiss Cracking Association archive: Letters from Marco, Pascal de S., Softwar, Thomas, and someone from The Dominators. There’s still more to come from SCA.

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A while ago we brought you letters from the collection of Arny, an Austrian C64 coder and graphics artist active in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These were letters he exchanged with his swapping partners – this time, however, we present his internal group correspondence. The first batch is from the time when he was in The Softkiller Crew (TSK), an Austrian cracking and demo group active in 1987-88, into which he got recruited in the summer of 1988 and in which he stayed for only a few months. These (sorry, German-only) documents shed light on what a new member of a relatively well-organised group faced in the 1980s: rules, contacts, expectations, new friends. An unexpected bonus of this batch: The flipsides of SSD’s letters contain printouts of logs from some 1986 BBS!

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