There came a point with my old Commodore when the only way to obtain games was pirating because they weren't being published anymore. I will not use cheat codes or even game guides on anything, however, until I've beaten the game on my own first.
Not to mention back then it wasn't really considered too bad to be a game pirate. I used to belong to the local Commodore user group. We had something like 50 members. Get this... The president of our user group was a county Police Officer and we held the user group meetings in the basement of the local court house.
The user group had a library where we all would bring in our games and programs for others to copy. Back then copy protection was extreme. Each month they would come out with a new way to protect games. We had software that would attempt to disable the protection on copying. If that didn't work I learned how to hex edit the files themselves to bypass security. I actually got so good at cracking the protection that I started receiving calls from overseas on different methods.
My all time favorite protection used was, if I recall correctly, on Auto Duel. Instead of a software approach they actually punched a dimple into the floppy disk. When the drive head hit the dimple it would cause it to bounce. This bounce would cause a disk error that the game could detect and then allowed it to proceed past the protection. If that dimple was not there the code would tell the head to reseat itself back the beginning of the track. Thus it sounded like the drive was going to break... Probably was their intention.
I had learned that if I opened the drive bay latch (thus lifting the head) and then closed it quickly it would then do the same thing as the bounce did if I timed it correctly. I could generally get it working in two-three tries.
d**n.... That was almost 25 years ago... I literally had something like 3,500 games. Back then you could have asked me how to play any one of the games, how to load it, secret codes and I could have gone on for hours... Now... I can barely remember how to run a DOS command
Everything has become so automated.
My two Favorite games from the 64 era:
Project: Space StationNeuromancer - Great game and excellent book. You may have noticed the group named 'Chiba City Hacker Society'. The book takes place in Chiba City.