College auditions are done! Now, on to my s3n10r pr4nk (I don't want the school searching for the actual words and finding this): Making a (probably grayscale) port of Pitfall that embeds a really annoying interrupt. I haven't decided in which way it'll be annoying. Ideas are:
a) an 8x8 sprite that stays forever on the upper left hand corner of the graph screen
b) Messing with the 8x6 characters
c) Something useful

I actually don't want it to be anything permanent or destructive. Anyways, it's good to be back

That's probably the least-destructive senior prank ever dreamed up; I salute you, sir! Not to mention that you'll also have a sweet releasable version of pitfall once you remove the 'prank'. I can't say I approve of a virus-infected calculator game though.

Yeah, I plan to put the actual Pitfall online. You guys probably won't ever see the infected version unless you ask nicely or go to my school.

I can't even see the infected version being a big problem. Actually, ethics dictates that you provide an undisclosed key or key combo to remove the prank part permanently or temporarily.

i would imagine a ram clear would do the trick

I'd hope so, especially if it's just a hook causing the prank. A really mean thing would be a parse hook that randomly added 1 to some homescreen answers.

I find it preferable to randomly add a number in [-1,1] <- that is a range, not an array

I'm pretty sure that I'm going to have to do that one, just so that the user would have no inclination to fix anything. Ty both...

No, I was recommending against it. That would be terrible if the user had a test or important homework, and you could get in actual trouble then.

A more diabolical thing to do would be to modify the OS so that it reinstalls that parser hook whenever the RAM resets...

...with a way to disable it, of course.

EDIT: you could also do the calculator virus thing, of course...and have it spread through the silent link whenever a link cable is inserted.

Let's just see what my not new, but feeble skills in the Z80 arts allow. I mean, all of that sounds nice, but adding a "disable" funtion might be tricky (hahaha!). Anything quasi-malicious will follow the game in which it is contained, which I haven't started yet.

You could always do something slightly more malicious =P

...dang, it's been a while since I've checked in here...

If you mean to terrorize people, I'd say just do it the dirty way. It's a senior prank, what can you say? Mod it to make incorrect answers randomly appear on the homescreen, screw up graphs, and such. Just make sure there's an easy way (but oblivious to most... hehe...) to revert it back to it's normal state. Something like a hook where all you type is "Revert," or "Fix," or "Stop," or "Heal," or even a certain number, like "42," or whatever into the homescreen, and it will the disable the evil modifications...

Yes! 42! Give it a time delay or something, is my idea. That way, it doesn't just screw with their calc as soon as they play. Save something that you decrement every time the game starts, and enable the nastiness once the counter reaches 0.

By the way, just to reiterate the ToS in case anyone reads this thread and tries to see what my liability is:

let us assume that we are discussing a hypothetical s3n1or pr@nk, that will, in all likelihood, never be carrid out.

I wasn't going to post in this topic again until I had some progress on Pitfall!, but it seems that some people expect this to be flashy/destructive. After giving about 10 or 30 answers, some message might pop up saying "You completely might want to change the answers to the last 10 problems that you just typed in, 'cuz they're wrong," and they'll be fine for about 120 problems, or forever if they're smart and clear the RAM; certainly nothing that they can't get rid of immediately if they want to.

It's really the effect that I'm going for. What I'm trying to do is make people think "Aw, man, that was infinitely more annoying than not having a $3|\|l0r pr4|\|k on my private calculator. I feel no urge to report this to the faculy of AAHHH, CENSORED." Now, imagine every kid in the school that's not a senior going through this.