[felipe]

Wow, I'm surprised!! I am Brazilian too, though my very first computer was a TK-85 (aka Sinclair ZX81), when I was 13... At the time Brazil was under a "market block-out" that blocked all imported computers, so we were forced to use the crappy Brazilian knock-offs!

A few years later I got an Expert (MSX) and in fact I ended up writing the first anti-virus for MSX computers (Viru-Boot, not sure if you ever seen it, it was featured in the magazines at the time)

Are you from Sao Paulo? In Sao Paulo the default hang-out was either Paulisoft or Disprosoft, the best places to get pirate software.

The good-old-days!!

[fcoury]

I am from Campinas, but I bought a lot of pirate software from those stores, and others. Since I was really young, my father used to drive me to São Paulo, to a joint on the Nacional building I think, where there was a software house that used to sell MSX floppies with software.

I remember it was one of the happiest moments of my life when I entered that office, picked the softwares I wanted from a list copied using a "mimeograph". Soon after that, guy that was helping us came back carrying a paper box full of 5 1/4" disks on it. I couldn't wait to be home and test all that :-)

Yeah, good old days... Playing Magical Tree, Nemesis, Penguin Adventure between MS-BASIC hacking. And I was 6! :-)

[felipe]

RIGHT! The place at the Nacional building (old downtown) was Paulisoft. Man, you could smell the scent of those 5 1/4" Nashua floppies as soon as you get out of the elevator!

ME TOO, My friends and I would carefully select the games over the week and then we couldn't wait until Saturday to get them. In fact, one day we almost got pickpocketed in the subway, and our concern was not our money or wallet, but protecting our floppies!! pretty hilarious now that I think about it...

At some point they published a book to hack the games so you'd get infinite lives. My friends and I figured out the assembly hex code for "minus one" (i. e.: one less life) and soon we were able to hack a bunch of games by looking for that byte alone throughout the memory.

Also we would hang-out at DDX. I lived my entire life in Vila Mariana (a Sao Paulo neighborhood), and we would just hang-out there with the guy who designed the mega-ram and the msx2 clone boards. The guy was doing pretty hardcore stuff, pure hacking... He would be considered a hero here in the US, but unfortunately in Brazil we don't recognize such talent...

There are still various MSX fan-clubs alive all over the world, and there are quite a few open source emulators. You can get all those games, and even MSX2 games too.

[Banzai10]

Men! take care with campinas water ;). Just kidding.

My first computer was a 386 already in the age of windows, and I was 6-8 years old :D

[fcoury]

Yeah, I don't drink it :-) The problem is not the water, but the low water coolers :P

[fcoury]

And your name is Felipe too? :-) Now that's coincidence...