Prev: Commodore 128 Specific Software - latest update
Next: C64 Ringtones
From: Anssi Saari on 29 Mar 2007 11:33
"Rick Youngman" <wlbbs(a)commspeed.net> writes:

> It seems there are a few pranksters amoung us. ( see the Shared Drive
> thread)
>
> so I will start this thread, to hear your tales of your best pranks.

I had this C64 program way back when which turned the display upside
down. I think it was fairly complete at least as far as characters and
the basic editor were concerned.

Well, these days some PCs have this functionality built in. I'm sure
it's great fun to flip someone else's display and watch them call the
helpdesk, if they are clueless...
From: Michael on 29 Mar 2007 12:20
Back as a freshman college student, our dorm hall was made up almost
entirely of gamers. One game that enjoyed a great deal of popularity
at the time was Stunts, a 3D stunt racing game, and we would all trade
custom tracks back and forth. A friend across the hall didn't like
making tracks but was always looking for some new ones to play, so I'd
frequently send him a copy of my newest creations over our network.

One day I told him the network was down in my room, but that I really
wanted him to try a couple of my new tracks. So I copied the tracks
onto a floppy and headed over to his room. Unbeknownst to him, there
was something extra on that floppy: a little TSR (terminate and stay
resident) program that I'd just devised as a prank. While he was
distracted by another friend of ours, I copied the tracks and started
my little program, which quickly disappeared to the background. Then I
started up Stunts and stepped aside to let him play.

My program was designed to wait a few minutes and then it would very,
very slowly begin dimming the brightness of the VGA palette. My friend
sat there playing, and after a while he said, "Hey, does the monitor
seem dark to you?" He turned up the monitor brightness to compensate,
but that really didn't help much as the palette steadily dwindled down
toward black. He was getting more and more ticked off at not being
able to see his driving, and muttered, "What the hell is going on
here..." My friend told him, "It must be night mode. Turn on your
headlights!", while we snickered behind his back. "How do I do that?"
I think one of us said told him to hit H, which may have actually been
the horn. "Still not helping..." So then I insisted, "You need to turn
on the high beams!" And that was when those of us in on the prank lost
control and started laughing hysterically. By this time the screen was
just about all black, and we heard a crash as his car ran into
something or fell from a great height.

"What did you guys do? Get it off my computer!" I told him just to
reboot and that would clear it out of memory.

But I may have "forgotten" to tell him that the program was still on
his harddrive and set to load again at startup. The second time it was
invoked, it was designed to wait a couple of hours before kicking in.

Later on that evening from across the hall, I heard him shout, "I am
going to kill you guys!"

From: Rick Youngman on 29 Mar 2007 12:51
On Mar 28, 5:47 pm, "Rick Youngman" <w...(a)commspeed.net> wrote:


Ok, here is one that will protect your BASIC code from being viewed,
kind of like "copy protecting it".

Really, the only way around the protection, is to know EXACTLY, what
line number, your program starts at...... which will be hard to figgue
out !!! (see what I mean below)

Type in this simple program and save it


22 POKE 2050,0
26 PRINT"HELLO"

now save it

load it.... and it will run just fine

now try to list it

It will defeat most casual hackers.


From: (O)enone on 29 Mar 2007 13:52
Rick Youngman wrote:
> so I will start this thread, to hear your tales of your best pranks.

We had a lot of fun in one of our PC labs at college. This was back in the
old DOS days running a load of 8086 PCs.

We took two PCs next to each other, and swapped over both the monitors and
the keyboards. (No mice at the time so nothing to worry about). We left the
two PCs switched on and watched from across the room.

Two people came in and sat down at the PCs, logged on and started working.
Everything looked perfectly normal, until one of the people finished what he
was doing and switched his PC off. The person sitting next to him was not
amused to find his screen suddenly went black and all his work disappeared!

--

(O)enone


From: MyPCHelp on 29 Mar 2007 15:43
Does anyone remember a program called "Win-Nuke?" It sent some kind
of anomalous packet to a Windows computer with the IP address of your
choice and would cause it to go blue-screen. It only worked on
machines running Windows 95 that had not been patched. One day at
work I ran this program and looked down the isle of cubicles. I
looked through the domain and grabbed all the IP addresses for the
people in view.. then nuked them one at a time and watched the blue-
screens just start popping up like dominos.. it was great.

One I've always wanted do to, but never have, is take a CRT apart and
swap the yolk-leads so that the monitor showed a mirror-image.

I epoxied somebody's mouse to their desk one day.. that was cool.

I took out somebody's CDROM drive and installed it upside-down in
their computer.. that was a hoot watching them try to figure out how
to get the CD to stay there while the drive closed.

One day I popped off all the keys of somebody's keyboard and put them
in ABC order rather than Querty. Somebody did the same to me a few
weeks later but just scrambled them randomly.

I changed somebody's mouse-pointer icon to an hour-glass.. so they sat
there for a while thinking their computer was busy.


First  |  Prev  |  Next  |  Last
Pages: 1 2 3 4
Prev: Commodore 128 Specific Software - latest update
Next: C64 Ringtones