Last Updated on January 13, 2025 by Dave Farquhar
When I wrote my blog post about Fast Hack’em, a fair number of C-64 fans said they preferred Maverick. I seem to recall a lot of those kinds of conversations in the ’80s as well.
Arguably, by 1989, Fast Hack’em was showing its age. If you had an MSD SD-2 drive or a pair of 1541 or workalike drives, Fast Hack’em was as good as anything was going to be, as long as it understood the protection schemes of whatever you wanted to copy with it.
Maverick was the next generation copier. It supported hardware that didn’t exist when Fast Hack’em first appeared, including RAM expansion and the 1581 3.5 inch disk drive. The RAM expansion was nice because it meant you could copy a standard single-sided floppy with only one disk swap with a single 1541.
Copying protected software from a 1541 to a 1581 wasn’t something you could count on doing. There were some instances where Maverick had a facility to unprotect certain software and copy it to a 1581, notably the GEOS operating system. I can confirm GEOS was a lot nicer running off the 1581.
The documentation admonished you to only use Maverick to copy your own disks, and not to pirate Maverick or other software. But I can confirm people did use Maverick for piracy.
The back story of Maverick for the C-64
Maverick was a product of Kracker Jax, a long time producer of c64 copy utilities. Prior to Maverick, Kracker Jax took a specialty approach to copying software. Rather than providing a general purpose nibbler, Kracker Jax typically provided specialized copiers tuned to specific software.
In late 1988, Kracker Jax released a new copier that combined the two approaches.
Renegade: the predecessor to Maverick
Maverick and Renegade are the same product. Renegade, released in 1988, was simply the first version of Maverick. Kracker Jax quickly changed the name due to there already being a C-64 game on the market called Renegade. Early ads for Maverick had an indicator that said it was formerly known as Renegade, not to be confused with the game of the same name.
If it seems like Renegade disappeared abruptly, that’s why.
Renegade’s authors were Bob Mills and Mike Howard, based on a design by Les Lawrence. Later versions of Maverick were written by Bob Mills, David Black III, Lawrence Hiler, Daniel Hill, and Mike Howard. Early versions were priced at $34.95, while version 5 increased the price to $39.95.
Version 5 of Maverick was modular, including a facility to make a custom Maverick disk with your own menu, just including the parts you needed. The very last version of Maverick was version 5.04.
Much like Fast Hack’em, you could upgrade to newer versions. Registered owners could upgrade on demand at a reduced price, or they could subscribe to future updates and receive them automatically.
The rivalry
Maverick’s distributor was a company called Software Support International. They had a rivalry with another company called Utilities Unlimited. They didn’t mention each other by name, but they gave enough detail to make it clear who they were talking about. I used to look for both companies’ ads in Run magazine every month just to see what kind of rude things they were going to say about each other.
Maverick versus Fast Hack’em
The most noticeable difference between Maverick and Fast Hack’em is the display. Where Fast Hack’em ran in text mode and used the standard character set, Renegade and Maverick had a graphical interface designed by Wayne Schmidt, a prolific C-64 pixel artist.
This made Maverick look flashier. But it also increased overhead. If you had memory expansion, that didn’t matter. But I still remember a grumpy dude named Sonny carrying on about it at a copy party in 1990. In his mind it made a difference. Sonny was about the same age then that I am now. And he had some influence, being the guy who helped a lot of us get our 1670 modems working.
For some use cases, Fast Hack’em was better. If you had dual 1541s, you could use them stand alone with Fast Hack’em. You couldn’t do that with Maverick. Sonny had the hardware that Maverick could use, but it was operating his BBS.
But I also think there was another difference between the two that came down to marketing. Maverick was a Kracker Jax product. It didn’t have anyone else’s name on it. Fast Hack’em said right on the main menu but it was written by a guy named Mike J Henry. There was always speculation about whether that was his real name, but it’s a great everyman name, especially in the United States. It evokes the name of the Patriot Patrick Henry, if nothing else. And everyone knows a guy named Mike.
Who was Kracker Jax?
We know now that Kracker Jax was also a small company, founded by a man named Leslie “Les” Lawrence, and their products were designed by Lawrence and written by a small team of programmers. Kracker Jax usually credited the developers in the documentation, but not in the ads and in the UI like Fast Hack’em did. If you pirated Maverick and never saw the manual, or even if you bought Maverick but never read the last page of the manual, you may very well not have known who wrote it.
But both tools were more than just nibblers, they also included a number of disk utilities. And with the later versions, Maverick did gain capabilities Fast Hack’em didn’t have. If you needed those capabilities, Maverick was better. That’s how you would expect it to be, being the newer product.
Speaking of Mike J Henry
It’s natural to wonder what Mike J Henry felt about his product being eclipsed by this newcomer called Maverick. He was probably okay with it. One of the pieces of hardware that Maverick supported was a memory expansion for the 1541 and 1571 called RAMBOard. The RAMBOard was designed and produced by a company called Chip Level Designs. Chip Level Designs was another name the Basement Boys used. And Lawrence Hiler, the other major name associated with the Basement Boys, contributed code to later versions of Maverick.
I don’t know for certain, but it’s easy to speculate the the Basement Boys decided they were tired of their software being copied, so they would leave the software part of the product to someone else while they concentrated on hardware, which wasn’t as easy to copy. In 1990, it wasn’t like you could upload a gerber file to PCBway or JLCPCB.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
I prefer Fast Hack ’em! Simple interface, powerful and of course , it was the first that I used.