Cracked? Trained? I kinda know what they mean, but...

[treismac]

Could someone please either give me a workable definition of what it means to train or crack a game on the Commodore 64 or point me to a webpage that breaks it down? I've run into more than a few roms that Remember has cracked and trained so I know that adding cheats and hi scores is part of it, but I believe there is more to it like fixing bugs in the original game and optimizing the game's loading time or something like that.

Thanks for the help!

[Jorpho]

Nope, that's pretty much it. "Cracked" just means that whatever copy protection was present on the disk was defeated – which you'd think would be kind of redundant if you're playing a copy, but might also refer to documentation checks. And "trained" pretty just means that some kind of cheat has been thrown in, though naturally there's no standard was to implement those and it can mean anything.

There is, to my knowledge, nothing in either definition that necessarily connotes the fixing of bugs. You might be thinking of a Fast Loader (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_loader).

[Mangar]

What Jorpho said...

Cracking is simply the removal of copy protection. Training is adding cheats. So for example "Rubicon +2" would mean the game come with two built in cheats you can toggle on off. Unlimited Lives, Unlimited energy, etc.. etc..

Optimizing the games loading time is called "Level Packing" or "Crunching" - In which the cracker would essentially condense a game that accessed the disk drive or tape multiple times (which back on the c-64 was a pain in the ass) and make it into a single load file. LOad once, and play... I've had guys in groups I was in take games that were 3-4 disks and turn them into a single file. Which was quite wonderful in the days of slow loading times, and even slower modem speeds.

Additionally: NTSC Fixed or Fixing is simply taking a European PAL released game, and programming it so that it could work on US Computers. Pirate Scene wise, this was often harder then cracking, and important since the majority of games released were in Europe.