The Cracking Zone

In the mid 80's, there was a local Commodore 64 legend who went by the alias "Lexas." Lexas had stood up his own BBS just as I was beginning to wander around in Omaha's BBS community. At the time I first logged in, Lexas had just turned 17 years old. ( I was a couple of years older )

Lexas' BBS was known as The Cracking Zone. It ran on a Commodore 64 and ... as you might guess .. offered bootleg cracked copies of C64 software. He was quite an astute programmer, but not just in the realm of BASIC. Lexas was pretty savvy with 6510 assembly language. The primary code for his BBS was in Blitzed BASIC, but he used machine code where it would speed things up. Lexas named the BBS software "Xavian". He sold copies locally for about $40.

In the early incarnations of Xavian, he used to store multiple messages in separate sequential files. The phrase "Accessing disk, please wait..." usually followed every command that one typed in. After a detailed article on RELative files in Compute's Gazette, Lexas changed Xavian so that it used random-access disk routines which sped up the message bases.

One of the things I found interesting about Xavian BBS's was that the message bases and file-transfer areas were tied together like Special Interest Groups (SIGs) in CompuServe. It didn't just have one massive file-transfer area.

I ended up chatting with Lexas over the Xavian chat function and we ended up talking voice from time-to-time. He and a cohort who went by the handle Lord Lucifer stopped over once and we compared our C64 software/hardware collections and we talked about coding. Lexas let me borrow his HesMon cartridge for a while. I ended up going out to his home once to return the cartridge. He was pretty cordial. He transferred me a copy of FirstTerm using a terminal called MidwestTerm (because that's the only term I had with file-transfer capability at the time.) Once I had FirstTerm, I could use Steve Punter's famous Punter protocol for file transfers.

I chatted with him over the BBS one day and he said that someone had figured out a bug in his system and was taking down a few of the local Xavians by entering 99e99 in the intial prompt for a user number. The entry prompt used BASIC to obtain the user number and the floating-point number 99e99 overflows C64's BASIC. Try this some time on an emulator:

If you enter 99e99, it'll look something like this:

To quickly remedy the situation, Lexas implemented a machine code subroutine that fired every 60th of a second on the IRQ timer ( vectored through $0314 / $0315 ). The interrupt routine would check to see if the system was back in BASIC READY mode. If so, it would stuff the characters 'r','u', 'n' and a carriage-return into the keyboard buffer to re-run the board. This way, any glitch that terminated execution of the BBS would cause it to start anew instead of just sitting idle at a BASIC prompt.

On one fine morning, I was looking through my new issue of Compute's Gazette magazine, and I saw this ad :

I called Lexas later. This sounded like he was moving into the big time.

He was soon off to college and his board went down so I lost touch for a good long while. I located him in the early Internet era and exchanged a few emails with him. The BBS thing didn't sound like it really panned out for him, but he's had a really good career in tech.

For those interested, a version of the Xavian BBS can be found at a number of C64 software archives.

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