Amiga Demos - Ripping

Ripping

The Amiga thrived on public domain, freeware and other not-for-profit development. The architecture provided no substantial mechanism for protecting software from inspection. In order to read the memory one simply performed a hot reset (which preserved the contents of RAM) and then booted to a dedicated floppy disk that could inspect and dump the memory's contents. It was therefore common for developers and hackers to "rip" music, graphics and code and then reuse it in their own productions. This led to intense competition in certain fields, for example, in the development of sound tracking software and Tetris clones, with each group of developers trying to outdo the current state of the art. In fact, some demos even featured their source code as part of the executable to save hackers the trouble of disassembly, though it came strewn with incendiary comments for those who would seek to improve on it.

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