Re: Toy Shop for Apple II available and a long story

[Hot Rod <hotrod.apple2@gmail.com>]

On Tuesday, January 10, 2012 10:47:57 PM UTC-6, datawiz wrote:
> Finally, while this game would have been difficult to crack back in
> those days, there
> is an approach that could have been used to distribute a working copy.
> A program
> could be written to read a track on a protected disk, and save it's
> nibbles out.
> A separate program would be written to re-assemble the nibble images
> back into a
> disk that has a non-standard format that would work (assuming the
> crackist removed
> secondary protection in the nibblized images). 

Just to add a bit to your archeology, IIRC, this approach was taken initially on Wings of Fury by "Mr. Slick" (back in the day).  See here:

http://www.textfiles.com/apple/DOCUMENTATION/conversion

except rather than nibble images, compression was used to "pack" and "unpack" the data (as compression was called within the Apple II circles then).  But the result was a working 18-sector version.  He also provided a copy utility that could be further generalized for other programs.  [The fixation to get everything back to 16-sector format likely missed the opportunity to pursue preserving use of the 18-sector format and just working around it.]

]HR