This series is dedicated to my friend ‘The Pieman’ who hosted ‘THE P.I.T.S’ BBS in New York City and sadly passed away in 2016. I know his son ‘Blake’ will be reading this sequence of stories with anticipation.
We will never forget you man, you were one of a kind.
Also I would like to say a big thank you to Fabulous Furlough, ex-leader of ‘The Humble Guys’ who helps me fill in the gaps of what happened almost 30 years ago, The Slavelord who has given me a plethora of memories from the early days and to Suicidal Tendencies (
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) is a continuation of my previous series, The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops.
I was once known as 'Bryn Rogers', a member of THG (The Humble Guys).
Other articles in this series:
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part One
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Two
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Three
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Four
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Five
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Six
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Seven
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Eight
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Nine
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Ten
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Eleven
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Twelve
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Thirteen
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Fourteen
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Fifteen
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Sixteen
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Seventeen
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Eighteen
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Nineteen
…’Warning, very geeky content coming up, you probably won’t understand a word but feel free to try’…
The BBS Advertisements
I was noticing some of the uploads to the Demon’s Forge now contained up to three of four BBS ads and so I added a pre-written PCBoard tool to remove known ones from the zip files.
Every time a new one appeared, I would add it to the list as I didn’t want ‘my warez’ cluttered up with these foreign ads.
Of course a Demon’s Forge ad was perfectly acceptable and added while removing those scummy other ones.
The .nfo file was invented by THG some years beforehand and was an information file that contained cracking notes, instructions, a list of members and BBS numbers and sometimes insulting colourful language to rival groups.
Now it was the standard for BBS ads, and they were getting plainly irritating.
...'BBS Ads nearly always contained ANSI, some were great looking but none were welcome in my .zip files'...
Hi.T.Moonweed was also using the same ad remove tool and mentioned most smugly he was removing The Demon’s Forge ads on The Flying Teapot.
I was quite incensed by his proclamation and recruited my mate 
He was quite the wiz with Visual C++ in those days and knocked up a small .exe file for me in no time at all.
‘just run this using the following parameters’, he said...
'admod.exe DEMONSFO.NFO DEMONSFO.OUT'
I knocked up a batch file to do the renaming and deleting, and after some testing was pleased to find that the ad remover no longer worked on the new DEMONSFO.NFO ads.
…’
After boasting to Hi.T.Moonweed that my ad’s would now reside in warez uploaded to The Flying Teapot, he called me a few hours later once again very smugly that he just needed to re-add my .NFO file to the ad remover and they were once again being removed.
...'the Demon's Forge ad was most welcome in ALL zip files of course. See the little 'à' in the top left corner on the 'D'?, that's the trademark of the
This was getting serious, and after some more talks to
Hi.T.Moonweed now had to concede defeat. Unless he wanted to manually remove my DEMONSFO.NFO ads from all his zip files future ones were going to stay put.
The Carl Lewis Challenge
This event likely happened in mid-1992, not November and it’s something that I remember with some fondness, though I doubt
I had been contacted by Mr Bond, my supplier who was the manager at the local computer store. He announced a new hot game was ready for me to collect.
...'Look at those graphics...., so good that it may have passed for a Lamers of Power release!'...
A joystick waggling game was not my idea of ‘hot’ but nevertheless I grabbed the single 720Kb 3.5’ floppy disk of ‘The Carl Lewis Challenge’, wildly drive home breaking speed limits and frantically tried to contact JRoK who didn’t answer the bloody phone.
Fabulous Furlough also proved uncontactable and so that evening I took the game to
Two hours later, sweating profusely and sporting bloodstained eyes due to staring at code using Soft-Ice he conceded defeat.
’I can’t concentrate with you bastards pouring over my shoulder with expectation’, he bemoaned to me and Illicit Trader who ran a local THG Distribution site named Carnage.
…’the pressure of being a famous international cracker was unfortunately a little too much for
Later that evening TDT released. ‘The Carl Lewis Challenge’ courtesy of Hard Core, and we figured it wouldn’t have mattered.
There were further stages of testing (without Virtual Machines!), packaging, writing the .NFO file adding relevant profanity to whoever deserved it at the time and then it would need to be distributed.
At time likes these I used to take The Demon’s Forge down in order to spread THG releases faster.
Time was of the essence and uploading to The PITS, Unlawful Entry and The Elusive Dream in that order critical.
...'Major Theft ran Unlawful Entry, TDT's World HQ. You had to be quick to get releases uploaded on this BBS, it was lightning quick'...
Very recently I brought up this memory to
…’the self-modifying went four or five levels deep, in the end I just couldn’t be arsed’…
It is a long running local joke now that he spurned fame and failed to crack his first game for THG.
However this was just that start of the unwilling
To be continued...
All images have been cited and are under the category 'Labelled for Reuse' or are in the public domain.
Small Pirate Icon Source
.NFO files courtesy of the .NFO libraries at https://defacto2.net
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