Fast Hack’em: The best C-64 disk copier?

Disk copiers were long a taboo subject that mainstream computer publications didn’t like to talk about. But not here. In this blog post, we’ll talk about one of the most innovative and popular copiers of all time for the Commodore 64, a program called Fast Hack’em, by Basement Boys Software. We’ll also talk about the company’s connection to Nintendo, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves just yet.

Fast Hack’em was introduced in 1985 by Basement Boys Software, a small operation in Oregon that may have been as few as two people. It was far from the first piece of software of its kind on the market. It wasn’t even the first piece of software of its kind Mike J. Henry wrote. But it was fast without compromising significantly on reliability. And if you had dual 1541 drives or an MSD SD-2, you could copy disks without tying up your computer.

Copying disks without a computer

The main feature that people remember about Fast Hack’em, 39 years after its initial release, was its ability to copy disks without a computer. If you loaded up either the dual 1541 copier or the MSD SD-2 copier, after the copy initiated, you could unplug the computer from the disk drives. Even without a computer, the drives continued copying. And if you wanted to make another copy, you just changed one or both disks. The drives sensed the change and continued copying the new set of disks on their own.

Meanwhile, you could play cartridge based games on your computer to pass the time while you were copying disks.

The reason this worked was because Commodore and compatible disk drives had their own embedded CPU and RAM. Fast Hack’em worked by downloading a small copy program to the drives that worked completely independently. After the computer had finished downloading the software and instructed the drives to launch it, the drives could just work on their own.

I only used this feature one time, when a friend brought his drive over. But it worked really well and we thought it was cool.

Why the controversy?

Commodore disk drives included a program that could copy disks. Fast Hack’em wouldn’t have been controversial if the only difference between it and the copy program Commodore included for free was that Fast Hack’em was 15 times faster and you could unplug your computer and do something else with it while the copying happened.

The controversy was with the other capabilities included in Fast Hack’em. Fast Hack’em also had the ability to copy protected commercial software.

Most Commodore software had DRM on it. Back then we didn’t call it DRM, we called it copy protection. But it was just an early form of DRM. The way it usually worked was the publisher would include intentional errors on the disk. When you loaded the disk, program would look for those errors. And if it didn’t find the error, it would refuse to run. And sometimes it would behave rudely and format the disk, or even in extreme cases attempt to damage the disk drive.

A program called a nibbler would duplicate the errors on the disks rather than skipping the errors the way a conventional copier would. Fast Hack’em was in this category. And when its regular copier couldn’t copy something, it had a specialized copier that might be able to defeat the toughest protections.

Software publishers didn’t like nibblers. In their view, everyone who bought a nibbler would proceed to make copies of every piece of software they owned, and give copies to all of their friends. They in turn would do the same. So they saw every sale of a nibbler as thousands of dollars of lost revenue. If not tens of thousands of dollars. Piracy on the C-64 was a real, and complex, issue.

Why magazines didn’t talk much about nibblers

This is a long way of saying why information about programs like Fast Hack’em is difficult to find. The magazines at the time took their advertising. But most were reluctant to review them or endorse them, lest they anger their other advertisers. Info, the edgiest of the Commodore magazines of the 1980s, talked about nibblers more than any of the others.

Nibblers were legal as long as you only used them to make backup copies of software you purchased legally. But there was a perception they were illegal.

After the final version of Fast Hack’em was released in 1989, it only took a few months for rumors to start that the Basement Boys were in jail.

History of Fast Hack’em

I can’t verify this first part of the story. According to legend, Mike J Henry learned the inner workings of the Commodore 64 and 1541 disk drive cracking games while he was still in high school, using the alias “Bandit Boy.” That led to him writing a disk nibbler routine. The alias “Bandit Boy” later morphed into “Basement Boys.”

One popular and widely copied game Bandit Boy cracked was the 1983 hit Blue Max. I have seen and played this crack myself.

I can’t confirm Mike J Henry was Bandit Boy. But the story is plausible.

Turning that nibbler routine into a product

Mike J. Henry co-authored parts of Di-Sector 2.0, a nibbler from Starpoint Software, released in the summer of 1984 along with Starpoint founder Bruce Q. Hammond.

The December 1985/January 1986 issue of Info magazine states that Mike J Henry struck out on his own after Di-Sector. Indeed, version 3.0 of Di-Sector from 1985 credits Scott M. Blum as Hammond’s co-author.

Henry next teamed up with Mr. Nike, an alias used by Lawrence Hiler, and they released the first version of Fast Hack’em in 1985. New releases followed in rapid fashion until 1989. The program cost $30, but you could upgrade to the newest version at any time by mailing in your official disk along with $6 to their post office box in Portland, and they would send you the updated version.

New versions of the software stopped at version 9.5 in 1989, which led to speculation about legal trouble. My opinion is they moved on to other things. Basement Boys Software also did business as Chip Level Designs, and one of the Chip Level Designs products was a modification to turn the MSD SD-2 into a stand alone disk copier. It worked like that module in Fast Hack’em, but ran from a ROM chip directly in the MSD.

In 1990, Basement Boys also released a copier called Fast Trac 128. This was a copier for the Commodore 128, rather than the Commodore 64, and it specialized in taking advantage of features only available on the Commodore 128 when used in conjunction with the 1571 and 1581 drives.

What Fast Hack’em was like

The software was utilitarian and unpretentious. It operated in text mode, with no graphics, used the standard character set built into ROM, and the only things it did for visual effects were some smooth scrolling and changing the background and border colors and changing some of the colors of the text to give visual cues. Unlike later copiers, the flair was all very low overhead.

And while other magazines were reluctant to talk about the software other than accepting its advertising, Info absolutely loved Fast Hack’em. They went so far as to say on page 58 of their September-October 1985 issue that it was their preferred in-house copier.

Why Fast Hack’em stopped in 1989

Lawrence Hiler gave a talk in 2005 about the history of Basement Boys, but he didn’t allow recordings. I wasn’t present, so I don’t have a first hand account of what he said. So there may be some gaps in this that he’s filled in.

In the late 1980s, copy protection schemes grew even more complicated, beyond what an unmodified drive could copy in some instances. Products to add memory to the 1541 along with copiers that used those expansions started appearing. This new generation of copiers also started taking advantage of other hardware such as memory expansion. These two factors made Fast Hack’em borderline obsolete.

Working as Chip Level Designs, they turned to hardware products, including a memory expansion board called the RAMBOard, the copy product for the MSD SD-2, and a video RAM upgrade for the Commodore 128. And they turned to Software Support International, of Vancouver Washington, to handle distribution.

They didn’t write a nibbler to take advantage of their own memory expansion board. Instead, they left that to Software Support International, who developed a nibbler called Renegade, which they quickly changed to Maverick due to trademark issues. If you didn’t have the Chip Level Designs RAM expansion, Maverick didn’t do much that Fast Hack’em didn’t already do, and Fast Hack’em had lower overhead. But Maverick supported all of the late 80s Commodore peripherals like RAM expansion.

I think they made the conscious decision to create hardware products that would be difficult to pirate, give a software copier one more try with the 128 product, and decide where to go from there. There was no version 2.0 of the 128 product.

But that wasn’t the end of the Basement Boys. And I’m not just talking about people continuing to use pirated copies of Fast Hack’em after you couldn’t buy it anymore.

The Basement Boys, Chip Level Designs, and Nintendo

The Basement Boys, Chip Level Designs, Lawrence Hiler, Mike J Henry, or some combination of the four share credits on approximately 25 Super Nintendo cartridges. After their Commodore products had run their course, they created music and sound effects code for the Super Nintendo. They licensed the code to game publishers to use in their games.

This isn’t as absurd of a landing place as it might seem. The Super Nintendo used a variation of the 65816 CPU, which is a direct descendant of the 6502 CPUs in Commodore 8-bit products. The Super Nintendo was the last mass market product to use that CPU series, so it was a natural landing place for two skilled 6502 programmers. Not only that, their experience writing useful 6502 programs that could run inside the tight confines of a 1541 disk drive’s two kilobytes of RAM was useful on the Super Nintendo. The Super Nintendo competed directly with the Sega Genesis, which had a much more powerful CPU. Applying their skills to squeezing as much performance as possible out of the Super Nintendo was a natural fit.

I don’t know what happened after the Super Nintendo ran its course. Hiler made some appearances in the 2003-2005 timeframe in the Pacific Northwest, but he has kept a much lower profile than many other Commodore programmers from the 1980s. Mike J Henry has kept an even lower profile, leading to speculation that Henry and Hiler were the same person.

But they were certainly young enough at the time to learn a new processor and/or a higher level programming language and find other ways to make a living as a programmer. I’m sure they did fine for themselves and are probably near retirement age at this point.