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December 5th, 2020...There is nothing more fun than rediscovering forgotten pieces of neat software. Recently I came across this cool little game called ShipHunt. Someone was talking about it on Reddit and wondered if anyone had a key for it. One of the most frustrating problems with PalmOS software is that most of it was released as shareware and as the developers started disappearing so did the method of registering/removing the limits on the software.
I had this crazy idea to contact old PalmOS developers to convince them to either give users a way to generate their own keys or release a freeware version of their software. I had been emailing people for a while before I had my first success with John Coogan.
Here is my journey to find him
- First I tracked down the old ShipHunt site with a little help from the Archive.org.
- On the support page it mentioned that we should whitelist 'John@comclin.net’ if I was having trouble getting my key.
- I then did a whois search for “comclin.net” which lead me to system13.
- On the system13 team page I saw a John Coogan which made me a little bit excited. I then took a chance and reached out via the company contact form.
John got back to me and it was so exciting. He was nice enough to answer some questions for me too. There is nothing more fun than software origin stories.
ShipHunt Origin Story by John
PalmOS programming actually started for me with TriLoan, a mortgage calculator. That was a different world and customer - realtors and bankers. So, not hackers! These customers were mostly not even interested in hacks. The registration was simple and I had a place in the code where the registration function returned a true/false. A hack showed up pretty quickly for TriLoan.
When I started writing ShipHunt I knew that gamers were much more likely to be hackers, and it would need a more robust registration. I recall that I broke the registration into several functions and I would move the separate functions around to different modules every time I recompiled. I even had false positives that would make ShipHunt appear to be enabled. It was an attempt to get the hacker to think they were successful. I did see hacks of ShipHunt, but none of them had the actual registration correct.
ShipHunt came from my interest in Submarines as a hobby. I just thought, there's gotta be a way to create a tiny simulator. Designing the interface was great fun, trying to cram tons of indicators onto the teeny-weeny screen. I had to re-learn all my trigonometry. "Someday you'll need this". My teachers were right, who knew!
When I got it all done, I came to the question: "How do I communicate the registration code?". I think this was the most fun part of all. I decided to formulate an email that looked like an EAM - Emergency Action Message. So, when someone purchased the game, they would receive an EAM via email with mission instructions and a torpedo unlock code. The last line was: "This is not a game. Good Luck Captain!". I'm laughing again now just thinking about it. I always responded to emails and questions as though I was mission control headquarters.
The funniest story I ever heard about ShipHunt came from a police officer who was playing the game while waiting in court. I put one message in ShipHunt that was meant to be totally humorous. If the sub was going down, and running out of oxygen, this message would appear: "C-c-captain, c-c-can't b-b-breath". Apparently when the message popped up the officer disturbed the courtroom with a fit of laughter.