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LongShot  (LS)

Ex member of :
Above and Beyond, Abyss ( -> 1988), Influx Staff, More Stupid Initials, The Avengers (1988 -> 1988), The Blasting Concept, Untouchable Cracking Force
Functions :
Coder, Importer, Sysop
Founder of :
More Stupid Initials

Handle alternative spelling :
Longshot

Trivia :
Fall '84 -> Spring '89

Way back, before time, I had a Commodore 64, which due to some strange reason I actually had a 1541 170k per floppy drive (one where you take the knife to make the disks double sided). After exploring the basic programs in Compute Gazette (A most excellent magazine at the time), I got my hands on a 1650 compatible 300 baud modem, along with a FREE QLink subscription.

After "borrowing" my parents Credit Card I started my QLink addiction. At about the same time, one of my more financially advantaged friends got a 1200 baud 1670 modem. After borrowing it for months at a time, I finally was able to purchase a "used" one from a friend of mine for about 1/3 retail price. My adventures in leeching had just begun.

I quickly learned how to explore "demo" accounts on QLink, and learned quite a bit of information about my Commodore 64 and the phone system. About this time I started running a CNET BBS called City of Thieves, it was in the 603 area code for anyone who could possibly remember. The BBS unfortunately suffered a minor problem, I only had one computer (though I had a dedicated phone line for myself), so when I used the computer, the BBS was down. It gained a reasonable number of users, around 100 or so, while it was up.

At about this time I started calling an Apple ][ BBS in Mt. Vernon, Indiana, called YoYodyne (unfortunately not so original), and explained to the sysop what "scanning" a telephone prefix was since he was curious about how I could manage to call him long distance. I didn't think much about this until I called back about a month later to discover that the Sysop and 3-10 of his closest friends had been scanning their entire city. Banks, Stores, Doctor's Offices all fell to this massive effort. Quickly I learned the power of information.

Later I started dabbling in Commodore 64 Assembling Language:

; Program to fill screen with A's on a C64
*=033c
LDX #$00
LDA #$01
loop:
STA $0400,x
STA $0500,X
STA $0600,X
STA $0700,x
INX
BNE loop
RTS
After taxing my brain so hard on things like this I went on to learn interrupt driven code, and started writing scrollers, color bars, moving sprites, and playing ripped music at the same time, otherwise known as an Intro or a Demo.

I joined up with some friends, El Cid, Nomaad, Corsair, Shadow Stalker, and we made up a group called "MSI - More Stupid Initials". We were supposed to be getting the hottest new cracks from europe and distributing them among warez kiddies here in the states, but we mostly stayed up late on Alliance teleconferences bullshitting.

I wrote a few MSI intro's, an intro for a group called ALEEDA, another intro and a small demo for some group I can never remember the name of, and other small projects. The largest project was a demo called "New Wave" which was a demonstration of compression at it's best. The last page was 52.5k long, consisting of aprox 30 Ben Daglish tunes that you could listen to, along with with a bouncing Scroller at the bottom done with Flexible Line Display (Something that allowed to "push" the screen down and up). As an aside I also published information about this in a C64 zine called "INFLUX" that a good friend of mine was releasing, issue 2 I think. Influx managed to survive about three or four issued and died, though I have heard that someone else picked it up and started adding to it. After running this "page" of the demo through a compressor it came down to about 25k long, giving me enough space to add more pages. So I had some lazy little color bar sprite thing before that and then a Sampled Voice (C64 can do 4 bit sampling). Before that was an intro page with a Sprite Scroll with side borders ripped off, which was something the European demo programmers had been doing for a little while but no US programmer had gotten the timing down until this demo (Shortly after El Cid released Radioactivity Demo with ESCOS, No Border graphics). After running all the pages through compressors the final product ended up being 198 blocks long, C64 disk block = 254 bytes long.

We did other some other stuff, investigated copy protection on disks, or the lack there-of on some things. Played way too much of Ultima III and IV, and Elite. Then around Summer of '88 MSI decided to get it's act together and reformed UCF (Untouchable Cracking Force), with an original member, JJ. (None of this is going to make sense unless you were around at the same time) We released a couple things, then I followed the common urge of all Commodore 64 users, I bought an Amiga 2000 with a 2400 baud modem. My telecomunicating speed had doubled and I had a machine that just rocked compared the 64. Any promises that I would still use the c64 when I had an Amiga were forgotten.

I took my BBS down for a bit when I got the Amiga, but had the itch to start another one up relatively shortly. So Amiga "City of Thieves" was started up on Amiga CNET after a 6 month hiatus. I got myself a whopping 30 meg MFM harddrive and a 2090 controller (sucker controls SCSI & MFM).

At about this time I decided it was time for a change of Handles also. On the Commodore I went as LongShot/MSI, I needed something different, something Unique. Panzer Boy was born. Before you ask, it's from a Walter Jon Williams' novel entitled "HardWired". Panzer Boy's are people who courier packages across the country side in huge heavily armored but not armed hovercraft. Read the book for more information, it's actually quite good.


Country :
United States

Sysop on BBS :
The Network (Co), Warez Galore (Co), The City of Thieves (Main)

User on BBS :
The Darkside, The Network

Releases released :
DownloadSexy Breakout + ... 1988 Crack

Credits :
DownloadChopper Commander +1F by Epic ...  1988 Crack  (Trainer, NTSC-Fix)
DownloadMega Psycho by New Generation Crew ...  1988 Crack  (Crack, Trainer)
DownloadStormbringer by All Stars, More Stupid Initials ...  1988 Crack  (Import)
DownloadThe Hunt for Red October by More Stupid Initials ...  1988 Crack  (Crack)
DownloadSexy Breakout + by LongShot, The Barrufets Crackers ...  1988 Crack  (Linking)
DownloadAleeda Intro by Aleeda ...  1988 Crack Intro  (Code)
DownloadThe Avengers Intro by The Avengers ...  1988 Crack Intro  (Code)
DownloadMSI Intro 05 by More Stupid Initials ...  1988 Crack Intro  (Code)
DownloadInflux #3 by Influx Staff ...  1989 Diskmag  (Text)
DownloadThe Maelstrom Demo by Jersey Shore Originals ...  1989 One-File Demo  (Help)
DownloadNew Wave by More Stupid Initials ...  1988 One-File Demo  (Code)
DownloadOutspace by More Stupid Initials, Orion ...  1988 One-File Demo  (Code)
DownloadMassive Retaliation by The Avengers ...  1988 One-File Demo  (Code, Text)
DownloadMetal Music by More Stupid Initials, Starfire Inc. ...  ???? One-File Demo  (Linking)
DownloadWild Demo I by More Stupid Initials ...  ???? One-File Demo  (Import)
DownloadWild Demo II by More Stupid Initials, Wild Styles ...  ???? One-File Demo  (Import)

User ratings :  
As Coder:awaiting 8 votes (8 left)
As Importer:awaiting 8 votes (8 left)
As Sysop:awaiting 8 votes (8 left)
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About this site:
CSDb (Commodore 64 Scene Database) is a website which goal is to gather as much information and material about the scene around the commodore 64 computer - the worlds most popular home computer throughout time. Here you can find almost anything which was ever made for the commodore 64, and more is being added every day. As this website is scene related, you can mostly find demos, music and graphics made by the people who made the scene (the sceners), but you can also find a lot of the old classic games here. Try out the search box in the top right corner, or check out the CSDb main page for the latest additions.
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