Chris Pile (programmer)

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For other persons named Chris Pile, see Chris Pile (disambiguation).

Chris Pile, born 1969 in Warwickshire, England, was a programmer, briefly notorious as "The Black Baron".

In the early 1990s he produced two highly acclaimed pieces of software for the SAM Coupé home computer: ProDOS (a CP/M implementation) and a very faithful port of the classic game Defender. Before that, he had worked on ZX Spectrum games like Astroball, Smashout and Turbulence.

In mid-November 1995, he was imprisoned for 18 months after being convicted of writing two PC computer viruses known as SMEG.Pathogen and SMEG.Queeg and the virus polymorphic engine known as SMEG. The viruses and SMEG engine were written sometime between December 1993 and March 1994.

The SMEG engine was produced as an object file which non-programmers could download and trivially link into an existing virus which, in turn, would make the resulting virus polymorphic and much harder to detect using anti-virus software. SMEG was also the first polymorphic engine with the ability to generate random CALL's to randomly generated subroutines within its encryptors. This gave the generated polymorphic code a more realistic appearance. SMEG also used exclusively 8086 machine language instructions, which meant it ran cleanly on any 80x86 based PC.

In the 1990s Pile spent time as a commercial games programmer, working mainly on the Nintendo Gameboy, SEGA Game Gear and Master System consoles. In late 1997 Pile programmed a PC emulator for the arcade game Asteroids by Atari.

The Queeg name, as well as some of the virus activation messages, are from the British TV show Red Dwarf.