https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5884
Facts
- TTV1 was the first file-based Amiga virus
- Its creation was a fun experiment. It was inspired by the boot block based SCA virus which had reached dubious fame due to its very successful spreading and the flaw of overwriting the boot block. Would it be possible to create a self spreading file, thus breaking out of the boot block dread?
- Development took place between spring and fall 1988.
- The early code name was HOUZ virus.
- Thinking up the name we tried to find something that would sound mean and at the same time on the verge to ridiculous. The final name was inspired by a rap band called The Terrorists.
- The virus does not harm the system. In fact, care was taken to avoid any even unintentional damage.
- Identity of the authors was kept secret for 30 years. It was officially revealed on March 9, 2019 at the Demonights 008 event in Bern Switzerland
- "The names have been changed to protect the innocent" shown in the message was inspired by the song Beat Dis by Bomb the Bass. They have sampled it from the Dragnet radio series.
- The "BGS9" was in fact a clone. Its code is almost identical even including the resident name "TTV1". It got more reach and thus was regarded as the origin.
About the life of the beast
- TTV1 installs itself as a reset proof resident module (KickTag/ROMTag) named "TTV1"
- On reset the resident module (virus) is called
- Execution gets delayed in order to gain disk write access. Therefore Intuition's OpenWindow function is redirected.
- As soon as the AmigaDOS tries to open the CLI window the OpenWindow gets called the virus looks for the startup-sequence on the booted disk
- The virus is looking for the first command (A) in the startup-sequence
- File request windows (e.g. "Disk is write protected") are being temporarily disabled
- Virus renames A to $a0202020a02020a020a0a0. This is a combination of none breaking spaces and spaces. The idea is that the user will oversee this "invisible" file.
- Virus writes itself as an executable command with the name of A to the disk
- Eventually A gets loaded and executed with all its parameters by the virus
The next time the user will boot the disk the virus gets loaded into RAM and step 1 takes place. On reset the horizonal beam position gets evaluated. If the beam position is smaller than a certain number the screen turns black and a
message in white letters appears.
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=1150la1n was the direct next step from imp89. New maschines and a new platform macosx. “Therefore i learned objective-c and coded real object orientated” and switched now to 3d games with opengl. The games were now more an more like gameengines and were object-orientated. But still hardcore coded. This change with the upcoming game engine like torque or unity.
Therefore the last games from la1n.ch till now were again hardcore coded games like axe (atari 2600 vcs), vecZ (vectrex 2016).
Tapes 2022-04-14 12:44:14
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=1435Tapes comes from the mainframe tapes and were popularised by music too. so often people used normal tapes-drives and for a zx81-games - there were even description how you had to connect the microphone-cable to the head-phone-jack and reverse. While loadibg a zx-81 game you hear the whole time the data coming in! so meta: sound was for people and maschines.analog digital. So there was no difference between an accoustic coppler and data from the tape.
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=2059there are two aspects came together in the universal computer.
1. computing (sorting)
2. control (cases, if then, input)
before this were seperated functions in analoge maschines.
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=1433Floppy disc or magnetic disc are faster and mor flexible than tapes. you can load and store autonom (no start and stop) and not linear, you can store them here or there. but of course also expensiver (you cant anymore use a (music) tapedrive.
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=3463What is next? 16/32-Bit but which one?
(- Macintosh)
- Atari ST? (like C64)
- Amiga (Multimedimaschine) expensive - Amiga 500
- Sinclair 68000
- Archimedes?
(- NEXT very expensive!)
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=1138First developing on Atari ST (Assembler) but never published something except a demo for a bbs 1993 (First founded by two brothers). First not released ‘product’. A listing game for Happy Computer.
Than switched to Macintosh (1995 ). Games in C . And than published over the net (website) or in Maganzines Disc-Magazines as Shareware. Paid first with checkes (almost impossible to get the money for 15$ games), so switched to real money and than to KAGI.com a first worldwide payment service.
Inbetween the author worked produced Flash-Games for advertising and ported a lot of games for Java (Applets) 1996 .
Afterwards switched to Objective-C on MacOSX with a new name: la1n.ch.
