Anyone ever get the Lamer virus on Amiga?

remember this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamer_Exterminator (wiki is slow today)

I had one of those programs you could check out the disk contents with and on infected disks it would just say "Lamer" over and over.

According to Wiki, the first Amiga virus wasn't made until 1987, 3 years after the Amiga came out. By the end there were quite a few and some virus checker programs were dodgy too of course.

Me!

Once ordered some PD software (games). The discs often had 'extras' on them, one of which I was surprised to find was a virus creator that could produce a range of nasties, including the aforementioned.

I remember having a viruskiller disk, that used sound samples from 'little shop of horrors'...

When the program was running, it would play 'FEEEEEED ME!'

and when done with the disk, it would play 'THAT'S RIGHT BOY!'

I had hours of fun with that. When running an AMIGA-BASIC program at the same time as running a sample, the sound samples would chop up in weird places and in different ways. If you sampled at the same time, you would get these weird samples, which you could use in games.


Andy

I had that too! Can't remember if I ever used it on someone I didn't like. I once entertained the idea of spreading jam on the inside of a disk :-)

Andy: Now that is odd. Reminds me that Blitz Plus or was it AmigaOS had a speech synthesiser built in. My 1200 had a HD and when it booted (in like 1 second) it said "fully operational). Can't remember if this was an OS batch file or a Blitz program...

>Andy: Now that is odd. Reminds me that Blitz Plus or was
>it AmigaOS had a speech synthesiser built in.

All amigas including OS2.0 had speechsynthesis. Then commodore decided that in order to pay the outrageous salaries of Irving Gould and Mehdi Ali, they had to cut stuff from the amiga line, which meant they decided to no longer license 'Say'.


>My 1200 had
>a HD and when it booted (in like 1 second) it said "fully
>operational). Can't remember if this was an OS batch file
>or a Blitz program...

The first most likely!


Andy

I had a disk with this on until about a year ago when I chucked all my Amiga stuff in the bin (sad day that it was).

I still think about getting an A4000T but whilst the 'retro-coolness' of it would be unsurmountable, the usefulness of it would be seriously questionable. Plus, I've got other things demanding my time and attention without installing WB3.1, Brilliance, DevPac and StormC on a computer that runs at less than 100MHz.

though... it would be cool to try hooking it up to my new Dell monitor..... . . no... no no. Must not buy Amiga....


Bah, WinUAE will have to do :)

The only virus that I got while on the amiga was 'Saddam'... although other than replicating and generating some drive-noise, I don't think it really did anything. It would infect the /l/disk-validator program, which automatically gets loaded & run on any floppy (or harddrive) you insert... disk-validator is a small OS app that lets the OS find out which blocks on a drive are bad. It would put itself on any floppy you inserted, and more annoyingly was the exact same size as the original disk-validator file.

So since I was unfortunate enough to have the copy on my HD infected, it jumped to pretty much all my floppies before I was able to wipe it out.

me !!!
its a shame ;)

i got some gayass virus that changed my entire system fonts to wing-dings .........

I recently found a ton of Amiga stuff, Someone on these here forums wanted it. if it was you, drop me another email.

Yeah, I got lamer at one stage. At the time I was floppy only A500 and all my games were write protected. My programming disks were badly infected though. I didn't lose anything but had to spend a day or 2 cobbling everything back together using backups. Traced it down to a backup of a game called 'Strider' that come with the computer. Probably the closest I've come to losing a huge amount of work as I was about 7 months into programming on a 12 month project.

Lamer Exterminator only overwrote the bootblock. It didn't destroy data on anything other than track 0. Overwriting with a normal bootblock fixed it, which was easy to do.

If it got onto any unprotected game disks, you were fairly knackered because most games used a custom bootblock.

These days, you'd just download the right bootblock from the internet. Those days, p2p didn't exist :)

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/L/lamer.html



I distinctly remember loading one of my data files into a hex editor and finding the word LAMER! in it. That's when I worked out what was going on. I think the virus sits on the bootblock but it does it's dirty work on the rest of the disk.

[EDIT] Here's the full lowdown:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamer_Exterminator

kenshin: me too! Looks like Vinylpusher didn't read the wiki link.

[edit] looks like kenshin didn't see the link in my starting post lol!


@Neuro: what on the Amiga? I've seen that on a PC.

Sorry 'bout that;) I thought I was going crazy. It's a long time ago but I remembered having unfond memories of the word lamer. Had to check and see whether I was going senile.

me too. I can see it spread across the screen in repeating lines in my file viewer. It's been burned into my brain as a "bad thing". I can even rember the file file viewer font and colours, and this was like 17 years ago or something.

My bad, I guess :)

It never did anything like that to me. I did corrupt a game disk with it (some £3.99 POS, so I didn't care). I think a backup of my AMOS disk got it, originally. Probably from a dodgy DPaint disk.

I know I never got a virus off a BBS or the internet.


As for wikipedia, I don't tend to take everything on there as gospel. More as a supportive reference to something else.

Amiga Format gave the LAMER virus free on a cover disk.

Just not intentionaly

that's so bad. It happended to me with another mag. I checked the disks and found a virus I couldn't believe it. The next issue there was a huge apology or snotty letters (iirc).