Copyright: Copyright ©


Basics

LOGON PLEASE:

What’s going on here?  Who are these guys?  What are they doing?  What am I doing?

In Hacker, it’s up to you to figure it out.  We can’t tell you.  We won’t tell you.  As every hacker knows, there just aren’t any instructions for this kind of thing..


Commands

Shortcut Keys

Menu Options

File

Settings


Commodore History

Birth of a Legend:

Commodore International Limited was founded in 1958 by Jack Tramiel, a typewriter repairman from the Bronx, New York.  It received much of it’s financing from Canada’s Atlantic Acceptance Corporation, and quickly grew to include typewriter manufacturing.  However, Atlantic went bankrupt in 1965, threatening to take Commodore with it.

To save his company, Tramiel began hunting for a new source of funds.  He found it in Irving Gould, a Canadian venture capitalist, who supplied the ailing company with $400,000 in exchange for 17% of the company and Tramiel’s pledge of all the receivables.

Price War and the Lean Years:

By the 1970’s, Commodore Business Machines had grown further, branching into calculators and other office machinery.  Business boomed until Commodore lost in a brutal price war with Texas Instruments.  Commodore had been assembling pocket calculators with TI microprocessors.  The chips cost Commodore about $50 per calculator, and the final product sold for about $100 each.  In response, TI came out with a competing calculator of its own manufacture using the same chip that sold for only $49.  Commodore lost $4 million on sales of $56 million and nearly sank.

Tramiel learned a valuable lesson.  In 1976, Commodore bought MOS technologies, a failing semiconductor manufacturer, for $800,000, ensuring that it would no longer be dependent on outside vendors for needed parts.

Growth:

Under Tramiel’s deliberate guidance, Commodore grew into a $1 billion company, growing sevenfold from 1981 to 1984, and was one of the largest suppliers of home computers in the world.

Commodore 64 boon:

By early 1982, Commodore had 5 new products in development, one of them being the infamous Commodore 64 (C64).  Believing he had a winner, Tramiel took a gamble.  He sidelined the other products and built up massive inventories of the C64.  Then, he flew in the face of the computer industry by enlisting the same mass merchandisers that sold the Vic-20 to market the C64 (K-Mart, Toys “R” Us, Target, and others).  By doing so, he proved that computer buyers didn’t need to rely on the hand-holding of an elite class of computer-literate salespeople and their specialty store prices.

The C64 was rushed to market with haste bordering on recklessness, and about 1/4 of the machines shipped didn’t work.  Commodore’s solution was a no-questions-asked policy on the exchange of defective machines.  After several months, the defect rate had been whittled down to a more acceptable 4-5%.

By 1984, about 4 million Commodore computers were in use around the world, and 300,000 more were being sold per month.  However, Commodore’s leadership believed that market saturation was still a long way off, since only about 6% of US households owned computers.  This was far less than the 20-25% that owned video game players during the peak of the home video game craze.

Tramiel Leaves:

Tramiel had been known for his iron-fisted style of management.  He was involved with every aspect of the company and anything or anyone he didn’t like was changed or removed.  This led to a class action suit in November of 1983, which charged that Commodore failed to disclose information about it’s operations, and did not build a strong management team.

According to a statement released in January of 1984, Tramiel said that “personal reasons prevent my continuing on a full-time basis with Commodore.” Gould recruited Marshall F. Smith from Thyssen-Bornemisza NV, a conglomerate based in the Netherlands Antilles, to replace Tramiel.

At the time of Tramiel’s departure, the home computer market was failing, causing Mattel and Coleco to leave the business.  Another company that decided to leave the industry was Warner Communications, which sold Atari to the newly unemployed Tramiel for a pittance.  Shortly thereafter, a stream of Commodore executives followed him.

Smith:

In an effort to make Commodore profitable, Smith took to downsizing, cutting the payroll by more than 45%.  Though the company had an impressive $339 million in 1985 holiday revenues, it made only $1 million for the quarter after paying off about 1/4 of it’s bank debt.

Commodore suffered through Fiscal Year 1985, losing $237 million, and getting into trouble with its creditors. The banks granted a much-needed one-month extension on Commodore’s loans, and, with the success of the company’s second-best Christmas sales ever behind them, Commodore defied the gods of bankruptcy yet again.

The Rattigan Years:

In March 1986, Thomas J. Rattigan replaced Smith as Commodore’s CEO.  Rattigan was hired in April of 1985, and it was predetermined that he would replace Smith, who remained on as a director.  Rattigan’s objective during the first few months of his leadership was clear - cut costs in order to stabilize Commodore’s position, allowing it to rebuild.  Once again, the payroll was trimmed from top to bottom, and 3 plants were closed in 5 months.  New controls were added in the finance department to prevent the sloppy reporting that had undermined Smith’s leadership.

Commodore continued to sell respectable numbers of its $150 C64 throughout 1986.  The Commodore 128, a successor to and more powerful machine than the C64, was selling at $300 at the time, also helping to keep the company afloat.

Rattigan’s policies worked.  By March of 1987, Commodore had caught up on its loans, and posted a $22 million earning in the quarter ending December 1986.  It also had $46 million in the bank, the most cash since 1983, its most profitable year.

Amiga:

Commodore’s next move was to release the Amiga line of home computers.  Code-named ‘Lorraine’ during development, Amiga was quickly dubbed “the save-the-company” machine.  Inside, the Amiga was packed with computing power.  At its center was a Motorola 68000, the same chip that powered Apple’s original Macintosh.  The Amiga had an additional set of 3 custom-designed chips, one each to handle stereo sound, graphics, and animation.  The Amiga was also one of the first computers to multitask, or perform several different computing jobs at once, such as word processing and game playing.

The Post-Rattigan Years:

On April 22, 1987, Rattigan was replaced by Chairman Irving Gould, the venture capitalist who had been involved with Commodore for over 20 years.  It is unclear as to why Rattigan was replaced after turning the company around and posting $28 million in profits over the four quarters ending in March 1987.  Rattigan himself claimed that he was forced out by Chairman Gould due to personality conflicts and that Gould was upset about Rattigan getting credit for the company’s turnaround.  Gould argued that the comeback in the US was insufficient compared to its rebound in overseas markets, which accounted for 70% of its sales.  In fact, despite its profitability, Commodore’s US revenues had declined by 54% in the same four quarters (ending March, 1987).

According to Gould’s ideology, the North American operation was to be a sales and marketing extension of the company, rather than the unwieldy, semi-independent entity it had become.  For the third time in Commodore history, a new leader began his term at the helm by drastically downsizing.  Under Gould’s reign, the payroll was cut from 4,700 to 3,100, including half the North American headquarters’ corporate staff, and 5 plants were closed.

Current:

On April 29, 1994, Commodore International announced that it had been unable to renegotiate terms of outstanding loans and were closing down the business.  In the months that followed, the liquidation process drug on, owing to the large far-reaching size of the corporation.  In addition, the fact that the company was incorporated in the Bahamas while a large share of the creditors were from the US made legal proceeding tense and drawn out.  On April 20th, 1995, almost a full year later, Commodore was sold to the German company ESCOM for approximately 10 to 12.5 million dollars.


Contents

General Description

How To Play

Commands

Scoring

Hall of Fame

Hints

Outside World

Game History

Commodore History

Credits


Credits

Activision

Associate Producers:	Tony Grant and Murali Tegulapalle

Production Coordinator:	Aaron Cammarata

Lead Tester:	Greg Borrud

Testers:	Christopher "Tex" Crowder, Marty Stratton

Audio Manager:	Michael Schwartz

Digital Eclipse

President:	Andrew Ayre

Programmer:	Jeff Vavasour

Special Thanks

Steve Cartwright, David Crane, Alex DeMeo, Brad Fregger, Alan Gershenfeld, Matt Hubbard, Russell Lieblich, Tom Loughry, Howard Marks, Tom McWilliams, Sam Nelson, Scott Orr, Dave Rolfe, Tom Sloper, Rob Swigart, John Van Ryzin, Computer Bargain Store, EMS Computer Services, Bare Bones Software, Games Plus, Centsible Software, Strategic Simulations Inc. and Commodore Country.


File

File

Pause (Pause)

To temporarily suspend the action in the game, press the Pause key.  Caution: If you leave the game without pausing, the game timer will continue.

Restart (Shift + F9)

Restarts the game currently being played.  Note: This will start the game over from the beginning, not from the most-recently-saved point.  To revert to a saved game, use the “Open” command.

New Window (Control + F9)

Opens a new emulator window.  The window will open playing a new copy of the current game.  These windows run independently of one another, and can be paused, played, and switched between at will.  You can also then load a different game into the new window.

Open Game... (F9)

Opens a previously Saved game.

Save Game (F10)

Press F10 to save your place in the current game, using the default save filename.  If the game you are playing has no default save filename (i.e. it has not been saved yet), you will be prompted to enter one.

Save Game As... (Shift + F10)

Press Shift + F10 to save your place in the current game, using a new  filename.  The name entered will become the new default save filename for the current game.

Panic Button (Shift + F12)

Press Alt + F1 to quickly hide the Commodore 64 15 Pack.  Useful when the boss walks by.

Hall of Fame...

Lists the highest scores for every game. See the Scoring section for score method/values for each game.

Exit

Closes the Commodore 64 15 Pack.


Game History

Brad Fregger, Producer:

“The original inspiration for Hacker was this: one day a group of people was sitting around talking about how hackers work. The people who worked with computers knew that hacking was just boring number-crunching and very tedious work.  Of course, this was at the time when hackers were just starting to appear in the media, if not before, and the people who were not into computers had this really romantic idea of what a hacker does - cracking codes, getting all these nifty passwords, and so on.  So Steve [Cartwright] said ‘Hey, that’s a great idea - let’s base a game on that romantic idea’.  He started plugging away, and before we knew it, we had Hacker.”

“So that’s the reason that there’s no instruction manual; to give the real feel of being a hacker.”

Steve Cartwright, Designer:

As of the release of this demo, Steve Cartwright's interview text has not been finalized.  Please look for it in the final version of the 15 Pack.

This program simulates the experience of being a computer hacker and is intended solely for entertainment purposes.  Activision in no way endorses or condones any activities associated with gaining illegal entry to computer networks or files..


Game Options

Game Options

This dialog box allows you to set your preferences for Commodore 64 15 Pack games. The settings presented here are:

“Controller 1” and “Controller 2”:

Use these areas to set the input mode for the game controllers.  The choices for each controller are “Keyboard”, “Joystick 1”, “Joystick 2”, or “None”.

The keyboard mode can be used when no joysticks are available, or if you prefer to use the keyboard to control the game.  To use, select “Keyboard” mode for the appropriate controller, and use the keys listed to move up, down, left, right, and fire.

To change the settings for either controller, click on the joystick function you wish to change (or “Fire”), and press the keyboard button you wish to assign to that joystick function.  For example, to make controller 1’s “left” be the letter “H”, select “Keyboard” from the pull-down menu under Controller 1.  Then, press the button next to the words “Left is”, and press “H” to assign it.

The Joystick settings will use the default Windows 95 joysticks 1 and 2.  To change the settings for these joysticks, pull down the Windows “Start” menu, then select “Settings“ and “Control Panel”.  Double-click on the “Joystick” icon and use the pull-down selection boxes to change your joystick selections.

Selecting “None” for either controller is the equivalent of unplugging the joystick from the Commodore 64.  This can be useful if the keys that are mapped to that controller’s commands are needed in the game.  This is necessary because a keyboard key cannot be used as both a controller direction and the key at the same time.  For example, if the “A” key was mapped to controller 2’s “left” direction, and you needed to type the letter “A” in the game, you would need to either a) temporarily select “None” for controller 2, or b) change the mapping for controller 2 so that “A” is not used.

The defaults for controller 1 are:

Fire Button:	Keypad 0

Up:	Keypad 8

Down:	Keypad 2

Left:	Keypad 4

Right:	Keypad 6

The defaults for controller 2 are:

Fire Button:	“T”

Up:	“U”

Down:	“J”

Left:	“H”

Right:	“K”

Animation

Allows you to set the speed at which new frames are redrawn on the screen.  To make the game play as close to the original Commodore 64 version as possible, move the slider to “Smoothest”.  If your system plays too slowly with this setting, move the slider to the right, towards “Fastest”.  The drawback to “Fastest” is that frames may drop out occasionally when your computer cannot keep up, resulting in a “jumpy” look to the game.

Volume

Allows you to set the volume for the game and Outside World sounds in the Game pack.  To make the sounds louder, move the slider to the right.  To make them softer, slide it to the left.

Enable Sounds

When the box next to “Enable Sounds” is checked, sound will be heard.  To turn off sound in the Commodore 64 15 Pack, click once on the checkbox.  To turn the sounds back on, click on the checkbox again. The default is checked (sound is on).


General Description

Temptation.

To stumble into someone else’s computer system.  To be someplace you’re really not supposed to be.  And to get the strange feeling that it really does matter.

“LOGON PLEASE:” is all you get to start with.  That’s it.  From there, it’s up to you.  If you’re clever enough and smart enough, you could discover a world you’ve never before experienced on your computer.

Very tempting...


Hall of Fame

In the Commodore 64 15 Pack, the Hall of Fame section will allow you to enter the high scores for each game. The High Scores you input will be saved on your hard drive until you remove the Commodore 64 15 Pack folder from your hard drive or uninstall 15 Pack. This save feature is not available in this Demo Version.


Hints

If we WERE going to give instructions, do you REALLY think we’d put them here?


How To Play

Basics

Keyboard

Joystick


Joystick

...and we weren’t kidding!


Keyboard

We told you, there are NO instructions...

*** Demo Only ***

This game requires the use of alphabet keys. We recommend that the keyboard setup remain as is, using either the NumPad (KeyPad) or the cursor arrows for joystick control. This will ensure that there will be no input conflict.


Outside World

Remember...

Remember staying up all night to finish that one game that had you stumped...

Remember the thrill of getting one level farther than you ever got before...

Remember the days and nights spent in front of your beloved Commodore...

And remember all those annoying interruptions!!!

Pesky little brothers; bossy older sisters; Moms; Dads; friends; alarm clocks; dates gone south.

Just when you thought it was safe to play your favorite C64 games again, the Outside World that refused to leave you alone years ago has come back to haunt you on the Commodore 64 15 Pack.  For details on configuring (or turning off!) these interruptions, see the “Commands” - Settings section of this help file.


Scoring

Nope.  None here, either.  Nice try, though...


Settings

Settings

Sound (F12)

This toggles the sound on or off. It serves the same function as turning the sound on or off from the Game Options.

Game Options

This dialog box allows you to set your preferences for Commodore 64 15 Pack games. The settings presented here are:

“Controller 1” and “Controller 2”:

Use these areas to set the input mode for the game controllers.  The choices for each controller are “Keyboard”, “Joystick 1”, “Joystick 2”, or “None”.

The keyboard mode can be used when no joysticks are available, or if you prefer to use the keyboard to control the game.  To use, select “Keyboard” mode for the appropriate controller, and use the keys listed to move up, down, left, right, and fire.

To change the settings for either controller, click on the joystick function you wish to change (or “Fire”), and press the keyboard button you wish to assign to that joystick function.  For example, to make controller 1’s “left” be the letter “H”, select “Keyboard” from the pull-down menu under Controller 1.  Then, press the button next to the words “Left is”, and press “H” to assign it.

The Joystick settings will use the default Windows 95 joysticks 1 and 2.  To change the settings for these joysticks, pull down the Windows “Start” menu, then select “Settings“ and “Control Panel”.  Double-click on the “Joystick” icon and use the pull-down selection boxes to change your joystick selections.

Selecting “None” for either controller is the equivalent of unplugging the joystick from the Commodore 64.  This can be useful if the keys that are mapped to that controller’s commands are needed in the game.  This is necessary because a keyboard key cannot be used as both a controller direction and the key at the same time.  For example, if the “A” key was mapped to controller 2’s “left” direction, and you needed to type the letter “A” in the game, you would need to either a) temporarily select “None” for controller 2, or b) change the mapping for controller 2 so that “A” is not used.

The defaults for controller 1 are:

Fire Button:	Keypad 0

Up:	Keypad 8

Down:	Keypad 2

Left:	Keypad 4

Right:	Keypad 6

The defaults for controller 2 are:

Fire Button:	“T”

Up:	“U”

Down:	“J”

Left:	“H”

Right:	“K”

Animation

Allows you to set the speed at which new frames are redrawn on the screen.  To make the game play as close to the original Commodore 64 version as possible, move the slider to “Smoothest”.  If your system plays too slowly with this setting, move the slider to the right, towards “Fastest”.  The drawback to “Fastest” is that frames may drop out occasionally when your computer cannot keep up, resulting in a “jumpy” look to the game.

Volume

Allows you to set the volume for the game and Outside World sounds in the Game pack.  To make the sounds louder, move the slider to the right.  To make them softer, slide it to the left.

Enable Sounds

When the box next to “Enable Sounds” is checked, sound will be heard.  To turn off sound in the Commodore 64 15 Pack, click once on the checkbox.  To turn the sounds back on, click on the checkbox again. The default is checked (sound is on).

Outside World

Use the "Nag Factor" slider to increase or decrease the frequency with which the Outside World sounds play.  Shifting the slider completely to the left makes the interruptions less frequent; to the right makes them play more frequently.  Each tick on the slider represents 30 seconds between interruptions.  That is, when the slider is all the way to the "Frequently" direction, a sound will play every 30 seconds.  Similarly, when the slider is completely to the "Rarely" side, you will only be interrupted every 10 minutes.

To turn the Outside World sounds off completely, click on the "Outside World Active" button to deselect it.  To turn them back on, click on the "Outside World Active" button again.  The "door to your room" will be open or closed based on the status of the Outside World sounds - open to allow sounds, closed to shut them out.


Shortcut Keys

Pause:	Pause

F1, F2 and Shift + F9:	Restart Game

Control + F9:	New Window

F9:	Open Saved Game (Disabled in Demo)

F10:	Save Current Game (Disabled in Demo)

Shift + F10:	Save Current Game As... (Disabled in Demo)

F11:	Help

F12:	Toggle Sound

Alt + F1:	Panic Button

Description of Shortcut Keys

Pause = Pause

To temporarily suspend the action in the game, press the Pause key.  Caution: If you leave the game without pausing, the game timer will continue.

F1, F2 and Shift + F9 = Restart Game

Restarts the game currently being played.  Note: This will start the game over from the beginning, not from the most-recently-saved point.  To revert to a saved game, use the “Open” command.

Control + F9 = New Window

Opens a new emulator window.  The window will open playing a new copy of the current game.  These windows run independently of one another, and can be paused, played, and switched between at will.  You can also then load a different game into the new window.

F9 = Open Saved Game

Opens a previously Saved game

F10 = Save Current Game

Press F10 to save your place in the current game, using the default save filename.  If the game you are playing has no default save filename (i.e. it has not been saved yet), you will be prompted to enter one.

Shift + F10 = Save Current Game As...

Press Shift + F10 to save your place in the current game, using a new  filename.  The name entered will become the new default save filename for the current game.

F11 = Help

Press F11 to see the Contents of the Help menu.

F12 = Toggle Sound

Press F12 to turn the game and Outside World sounds off and on.

Alt + F1 = Panic Button

Press Alt + F1 to quickly hide the Commodore 64 15 Pack.  Useful when the boss walks by.