DJ Master Marino & The Wall Breaker – Summer’94 Megamix

This was my first megamix and quite probably, the first megamix ever made in the Dominican Republic.
The megamix is a collaboration between Jose Gutierrez (aka DJ Master Marino) and myself (aka The Wall Breaker).

Why was I known as “The Wall Breaker”?, well… let me explain:

Thanks to my good friend Roberto Lion, around 1986 I got acquainted with a video game by the name of International World Championship of Karate for the Commodore 64.
The gameplay was amazing, the graphics were among the best at the time and the music was simply a masterpiece created by Rob Hubbard.
Long story short, I wanted that game more than anything but, unfortunately, there was no known way to copy it as it employed all of the most effective anti-piracy techniques known at the time: intentional bad sectors, uncommon diskettes sizes, etc… and in order to have it I had to copy it since no one sold Commodore games in the country.

In 1985, CBM released the Commodore 128 which I was lucky to own.
In order to maintain full backwards compatibility with the Commodore 64, for which the games were developed, CBM manufactured the C128 in such a way that it included a full C64 inside it and to access it (that is, to use it in C64 mode) you just had hold down the Commodore logo key while it was booting.

Why is this relevant? Well, because the C128 had a way of soft-rebooting. A soft reboot is a reboot where the CPU is restarted but not (necessarily) all resources are released.
So if you loaded a program under C64 mode, soft-rebooted it and entered C128 mode, most of the data stored in RAM remained intact.

I noticed this behavior while working on some of the programs I was developing  and it definitely caught my attention; but it wasn’t until one day while I was playing the original version of International Karate that came to me the idea of how it could be cracked! Bare in mind that this particular game hadn’t been cracked before.

So what I did was as simple as:

  • Boot into C64 mode
  • Load the game
  • While inside the game, soft-boot into C128 mode
  • Using various tools (I can’t remember their names) I located the segment where the game was stored so I simply created a small program to save that particular memory segment and ended up with a memory dump of the original game that could be easily copied.
  • Finally, I created a simple loader which, of course, featured a “cool” graphic of a broken wall

I used the same technique for other games such as The Last Ninja and, all of a sudden, became one of the most successful crackers (in the country) for C64 games.

Lots of interesting stuff happened next, but I’ll leave that to some future post at my other blog
For now, it’s suffice to know that such a feat earn me the name “The Wall Breaker” as I was able to crack (some supposedly) nearly uncrackable games.

Anyway… back to the topic.

DJ Master Marino & The Wall BreakerIt took us quite sometime to figure out what effects, that sounded good, could be applied to the songs. My strong influences from the Max Mix megamixes can be clearly heard throughout the whole megamix.
DJ Master Marino’s main job was, basically, to select which songs where to be included into the megamix and to beat-match them.

The beat-matching process was quite tedious as he had to beat-match every single song, using a Pioneer CD player so that I could then record them into the computer.

Actually, if you pay close attention to the megamix, you’ll notice the mixes and effects get better towards the end as we were actually learning how to mix as we were creating it.
The end is a bit abrupt and that’s because DJ Master Marino wanted it to be finished for a gig he was playing at the city’s University (PUCMM) so I had to rush it to get it done…

You’ll also notice that the sound quality is quite bad but that’s because I lost the sources for the project so I had to recorded it from a tape!

The whole megamix was made using SoundForge, while it still was owned by SonicFoundry.

Download: Summer’94

Format: 44.1KHz@16bit Stereo
Length: 9″59′ / 9.24MB
Includes:

  • Reel To Real – I Like To Move It
  • Melodie MC – Dum Da Dum
  • 4 None Blondes – What’s Going On [Night Ground Mix]
  • The Grid – Swamp Thing [Southern Comfort Mix]
  • C+C Music Factory – Robi-Rob’s Boriqua Anthem
  • Viceversa – Ella (Tu Piel Morena)
  • DJ Space’C – Forever Young
  • Le Click – Tonight Is The Night