When I was younger, I used to mess up Woolies C64's (when they used to sell them), by writing a program that displays coloured blocks. To make it more interesting I always disabled the RUN/STOP key, so the only way to stop it would be to switch the machine on and off again.

Here is my take on it, complete with difficulty of stopping the program (although its a bit easier now)...

hehe for me it was trs80's but one time i made it scroll "tandy computers" instead of something silly and they left it all day.

hehe and changing the colours in the c64 with the poke commands
poke 53280,0
poke 53281,0

Yes, do it fast enough and you'll go nuts!

You sad pair ...

Are you bored by any chance nick?

At the time, I was testing the demo of DBPro, and needed something decent to test it with...

So what did you use

ho ho ho...

I think its quite good - a bit dull but quite good. Plus its a pain to escape from, which is the important part.

Fast loader

Apparently, it used to be possible to change the colour of the black border surrounding the display - a poke into memory somewhere. Is it still possible ?

No black border here on my laptop display

I know that it used to be possible to access the vga control registers directly, but I don't think it's possible anymore with DirectX

LOL, remember the old DOS reset command....

jmp 0

anyone have a cockroach turbo rom in their c64? and did anyone have a disk drive switch so you didnt have to punch a hole in the disc to read write it?

No - never did that...

No, I used to cut mine out with a pair of scissors, although my hole was always much bigger than the one that came on the first side
One of my friends cut his with a hole-punch, but his disks looked like they'd been eaten by a mouse or something

As long as still worked...

Anyway, see my infamous C64 blocks in my bouncing lines demo...