FAQ

What is indexed so far?

- 37000 texts from 26000 Commodore 64 demos from the years 1983-2013. They are taken from ftp://ftp.scs-trc.net/pub/c64/Demos/pal - prg, t64 and d64 files.
- 60000 texts from 48000 Commodore 64 Crack intros from Spankerz HEaven (the Mason archives).

Is this a good idea?

If you have written a scrolltext and want it removed, you're welcome to tell us. None of these texts are currently indexed by webbots/Google/Bing/etc. That might change someday.

Is Scrolltexts.com legal?

* Making a demo and distributing it, is completely legal in all aspects of it.
* Demos are released to the public by their respective producers, with the intention of showing them to the world. It must be assumed that a license similar to Creative Common applies, which means spreading is allowed as long as the original writer is duly credited.
* Scrolltexts.com just makes reading and cross referencing of the text a lot easier. Copyright remains with the original authors - hereby all duly credited.

This means:
* Copying a scrolltext from scrolltexts.com is allowed, as it would if you copied it from the demo. Scrolltexts.com urge you to credit the original writer, and that you reference scrolltexts.com as your source.

Regarding scrolltexts from intros (the cracker group's introduction before the actual game):
* Copying a game on Commodore 64 and giving it to your close friends is legal in Sweden. (URL §12 - https://lagen.nu/1960:729) It was legal back then, and it is legal now. You pay a sum extra for every hard drive you buy today to compensate the atuhors for this right. Back then, it was called "kassettkopieringsavgift" (for magnetic media) and now it's called "Privatkopieringsersattning" and is applicable to all media (first and foremost CD, DVD and harddisks). The reference to Sweden is done as this is the jurisdiction of the producers and the server of scrolltexts.com
* Cracking a game on Commodore 64 is likely legal in Sweden. You're free to investigate and modify any kind of digital data. (See https://lagen.nu/dom/rh/2006:80 where the cracker was sentenced for copying but not for the actual cracking).
* Distributing a game, by any mean, without the authors approval, is illegal.

However, Scrolltexts.com is capturing scrolltexts from intros and not from the games. It is assumed that the intro is covered by the same legal framework as demos which means that Scrolltexts.com is safely within the legal boundaries also for the scrolltexts from intros.

How long does it take to find a scrolltext?

5 seconds. For the Commodore 64 scrolltext analyzer, each demo is emulated for 4.1 seconds at warp speed, then a screen dump and memory dump is taken. This dump is then screened for scrolltexts, and written into a database.

What is a demo?

A demo is a non-interactive demonstration of skills, it could be technical, musical or designing skills - often using a computer.

What is a crack?

A crack is a modification to a commercial copy-protected product made by a cracker. Most of the time, it allows you to easily make a digital copy of the product.

There's something wrong with text X.

Picking out text from within a compressed commodore 64 binary program is hard. Doing it from tens of thousands of programs is even harder. And, seriously, we don't want to manually fix anything. Feel free to contribute and correct things, but we can't promise you that we will find the time and prioritize getting it to the right place.

Could you implement a feature for me?

Probably not. Feel free to tell us, but the best thing would be if you'd implement it yourself. It's all based on Python, MySQL, PHP, Apache2, HTML, CSS and bash. If you know what we're talking about, then you probably know how to implement it as well.

What is left to index?

- Commodore 64 Demos from ftp://ftp.scs-trc.net/pub/c64/Demos/ntsc
- Commodore 64 Demos from ftp://ftp.scs-trc.net/pub/c64/Demos/dtv/pal
- Commodore 64 Demos from ftp://ftp.scs-trc.net/pub/c64/Demos/dtv/ntsc
- Derbyshire RAM disk collection.
- Commodore 64 CSDb releases.
- Amiga 500 His Master's Noise and Sounds of Gnome scrolltexts.
- Suggestions? Please get in touch!

Is this fun?

That's up to you to decide. For us, it's fun.

What has happened so far?

27th of April 2013: Pex 'Mahoney' Tufvesson presented www.scrolltexts.com as a wild compo entry at Gubbdata 2013. 16000 scrolltext were put on the www.scrolltexts.com website. These texts were from all the Commodore 64 .prg and .t64 files from ftp://ftp.scs-trc.net/pub/c64/Demos/pal
7th of May 2013: 26000 demos from ftp://ftp.scs-trc.net/pub/c64/Demos/pal were indexed, resulting in a total of 37694 scrolltexts being readable here. All Commodore 64 .prg, .t64 and .d64 files were analyzed.
15th of May 2013: another 48000 c64 crack intros were indexed, resulting in another 60000 scrolltexts being added - a total of 97000 scrolltexts are now searchable here.
9th of December 2013: Cleaned up MySQL performance and changed the search function of this site.