2023 ViTNO Writer’s Contest – Entry #2 – “Pirating Amiga Stuff in the 90’s”

Author: Supercruiser
Date: June 14th, 2023
Category: Non-technical

So to put things into context and the memories all tend to get a little blurred the further things go on, but this is how I recollect the below.

I come from a small town in the regional area of South Australia, and my first dial up experience was with a Tandy Colour Computer 2 when a mate lent me an acoustic coupler, and I managed to get it to dial out from my Coco, at first I didn’t actually believe it worked as the text began to crawl across the screen at unadulterated 300 baud, but it worked and it further cemented my lust for computing…

Moving on I ended up jumping to an Amiga 500, and then onto an Amiga 1200 with a hard disk (shit hot hey…)  But I lived in the rural area and it was generally somewhere around a dollar every five minutes to dial out on the modem.. It was a killer.. I still remember my mother absolutely effing freaking out about the phone bill.. Cause you know I will just jump on for half an hour and three… four.. eight hours later you were cruising around BBS’s and just generally having a bloody awesome time..

I had access to a few free BBS’s, the County Club that had “special” GIF files for downloading, and we used to get an hour free every day.. Well we used to yank the modem at around 59 minutes with some quick on and off action and quite often you would get reset and get another hour or so.. We would sit around on the weekend with two or three Amigas lined up dialed out, playing games, chatting.. Few were into MUDS etc, but generally we just grabbed random software etc…

Anyway we were pirating shit left right and centre, and a mate who I met through the local Amiga club, and lived next town on and on the way to work had an A1200 like me and we became pretty good mates (and his sister was pretty tidy) and we knocked about together a bit, mainly around the Amiga warez stuff.
Well it sorta got to the point where he managed to get access to this pirate site/BBS called the “Pirate Cove”, and he had a shitty modem, I had a pretty good job, and I got a new 56k modem, but couldn’t really use the thing cause of the exhorbarent telephone rates, so I gave it to him.. I think we flicked off a cheque to someone every few months and we got a couple of hours of access every day to “The Cove”

I’d touch base two or three times a week, buying blank floppies like a mad man, he would just download as much crap as possible.. I’d roll in and he’d have Cannon Fodder, or Alien Breed or some random utility, whatever was going on at the time.. It was bloody awesome.  This went on for a year or so and we were grabbing piles of gear, and he says one day, “I’ve been chatting to the dude from the Pirate Cove, and he said we can come down and copy as many disks as we like for a few slabs of beer”.. Well, Fuck Me.. When can we leave?

So we set it up, I was the only one that drove, and I grabbed some beer and a couple of hundred blank floppies and we hacked on down to Hallett Cove.. A small town south of Adelaide.. Hence the Pirate Cove.

We hooked in, had a couple of beers and spent the next three to four hours copying disks… Now to put things into perspective, this dude’s house was a small study, the first room on the left, and it had two amigas in it, both with two floppies, and then just shelves loaded with disks, and I shit you not, probably close to three to five thousand disks.. I was in my element, as much as I was into games, I was into productivity software as well, so there were the latest versions of lightwave, imagine, vista pro, all sorts of hard to find gear and a gazillion games to be had all ripe for the picking…

We hooked in for quite a few hours, until the dude sorta really got the shits up with us copying disks and we rolled out the door with a couple of hundred floppies full of the latest gear and it got handed out to other mates, and was just one of those things that I will never forget..

Lost track of the mate who I gave the modem too as he moved away… He did come to a few gaming sessions as we moved into PC’s etc but is the way it goes in the long lost friendship world…

But the story does not end there…

I moved overseas, sold off all my Amiga gear and got on with life and moved into the Intel world, got into ICT, got burnt out over ICT, and moved into a non computer related field, until a mate touched base and said, ‘do you want an old Commodore 286, otherwise it’s going to E-Waste.”

Stand clear, that’s coming home for sure.. I don’t think I had lusted over a computer for over ten years, and when it hit the coffee table (much to the other halfs disgruntled looks, “How long is that thing staying there?” ), and I fired it up to California Games, Duke 2D and some other DOS classics, I sorta hit the reto bug.  Stand clear three years later, shit tonnes of retro computers, most of the Amigas, C64’s, Amstrads, Atari;s you name it, all came incoming..

True passion is with the Amiga, and fast forward 30 odd years and I am chatting to someone on the Amiga User Group on facebook and we are talking about pirate sites from the 90’s and I mention I used to be on the Pirate Cove and this guy goes, “My mate used to run that”, I am like, “Fuck me, no way”.

I’m like, I was there grabbing shit for quite a while, and we ended up going to his house and copying piles of warez one day, not sure of the dude’s name, but I know he was set up in a study,  on the first room on the left.  He comes back and is like, nah, no way… He had it setup in a back room of his house and in the end the guy got busted for using calling cards to get the warez and was lucky to get off…

I’m like, well that’s cool, but I am sure it was this other place…

Day later the dude gets back to me and he is like, you were right you know, my mate who ran the Pirate Cove took it over from this other guy and yeah he did run it out of his study from another house in the first room…

So the ole memory box works pretty well, and that is the story of the Pirate Cove that got busted but in a different location, a different time and a distant memory.

So.
Stay Retro.
Supercruiser…