Information

Computerbrains was founded in 1983, and we have been active in the scene since then.

• Commodore 64, 1983-1987
• Amiga, 1987-1993

Computerbrains are probably most remembered for the large amount of quality game cracks that we released, but do remember that we also have released quite a lot of selfmade useful stuff. The active member combination has varied along the years, we are all born in the sixties so we are not so young anymore, but we are still young in mind :) .

Members

Ale. Contribution: Cracking, Coding, Boasting, Drawing and Swapping. Other: Founder of Computerbrains in 1983. With his very special personality he fooled and annoyed a lot of folks which could be both positive :) and negative. Has always been a guy on the border, always extreme, although he is educated at university level his current occupation and presence is sadly unknown...

PHS. Contribution: Cracking, Coding, Drawing and Swapping. Other: Founder of Computerbrains in 1983. The most active member and the only one active over the whole period. Likes to make the impossible possible, and has done it several times. Has always been a decent guy :) although he is interested in the extreme as well, and nowadays has a decent carrier in academia and the programming industry.

Mr.Music Contribution: Making music, Promotion, Supplying and Swapping Other: Also known as 'The Plough'. Active since the founding of Computerbrains in 1983. He has always been a decent guy, and nowadays has a very decent carrier indeed. We have Mr.Music to thank for that this site exists today!

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C64 History

The headquarters for Computerbrains in 1983 to 1986 was in Ale's fathers apartment in Karlstad in Sweden. Ale's father liked to drink a lot of alcohol and to look at pornographic movies. He often helped Ale when some angry lamers called and asked for their games, by screaming and swearing at them in finnish. In this apartment also lived Ale's friends, "The animals". The animals were white albino rats with red eyes and pink tails, and lived together with up to 50 mates in a little cage. When they were too many, Ale often released some of them in a local supermarket, which were like a paradise for these little nice creatures. But the paradise didn't last long as old people got scared and they temporarily had to close the supermarket. When Ale got visitors he often used to throw some of the rats in the face of the visitor as soon as they entered the apartment. Especially Mr.Music was not very found of this little "practical joke".

We never cracked any game for getting some profit ourselves, we just wanted to get all the games ourselves. We were really like collectors, just collecting for the sake of it. Many people send us originals for cracking. At one instance we even succeeded to crack some games inside of the computer store!!! Ale and I (PHS) asked if they had some new games, and they gave them to us for playing on the computer in the store. We had brought with us our machine code monitor cartridge, some disks and also some blank disks :) . So we just went cracking and copying inside of the store... Sometimes the woman in the store asked us what we were doing, because she saw some machine code listings on the screen and wondered what was going on. We told her that we were investigating the quality of the code, of course we wouldn't like to buy games with bad code in it :) ... We didn't buy any games though, we left the store with asking when they would get a delivery of new games. It was really hard to keep back the laugh when we left...

Although we cracked a lot of games, probably about 1000, that wasn't the main contribution we did. As we were one of the first groups compressing games into one part, I (PHS) made a lot of compressor utilites with my own techniques. And as we needed some good cracking tools I also made a machince code monitor on cartridge called CCS-MON. The turbotape of this cartridge was also released separately, called PHS-Turbo, which had the nice feature that it usually stayed intact in the memory after playing a game, and could be restarted with SYS 321 after reset. I also did some emulation work already in 1986, I actually converted two games from VIC-20 using some kind of emulation framework. I and Ale also made a commercial game in 1985 called Time Zero, which was advanced for its time, it had digitized speech (my voice) and had the upper and lower borders removed - which must have been one of the first programs to do that - I just invented it myself by some coincidence.

Amiga History

On Amiga we did a lot of cooperation with DEFJAM and we are probably very well known for the compact-disks. One of the first things I did in 1987 was to make the utility called CCS-BOOT which enabled you to turn of extra memory and disk drives. We also did some harddisk-conversions of some floppy disk only games in the nineties. On Amiga we did some demos as well, and were visiting several computer parties in Sweden during the late eighties. We also made some attempts to make some commercial games, but they were never finished due to lack of time and military services and school and so on. I also made a machine code monitor called CCS-MON as well, partly designed together with Mr.Music.