Re: Old Apple II games

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

william strutts asked:

>I have been trying to archive my Apple II collection of 5.25" disk
>but I have been running into disk that are unreadable by Asimov.
>They work if you boot them but I can't run a CATALOG of
>the diskettes.  Is this some form of Apple II copy protection?
>Is there some program that will allow you to archive Apple
>II copy protected games?  I would like to be able to archive
>the disk so that I can transfer them to my PC so that I can
>burn a CD-R of my Apple II collection before the diskettes
>go bad.  Any suggestions or is this a lot cause?  Once such
>game is a Conan the Barbarian game.

I don't know specifically about Conan, but a very large fraction
of _original_ Apple II games are copy protected.  In fact,
learning what kind of protection was employed and how to
defeat it was more enjoyable for many than playing the game!
As a result, there are many "deprotected" versions of Apple II
games (particularly DOS 3.3 games).

>Does anyone know of any disk tools that will recover the
>contents of a diskette that is going bad?  I have Copy II
>and something called Locksmith but they don't seem to
>recover disk.  They just verify the disk.  Is there such a
>tool like Scandisk or Norton Disk Dr. for the Apple II's?
>I have an original Apple ProDOS diskette that I would like
>to try to save.

Verifying a copy protected disk will usually result in
finding lots of "errors"--since the disk is not a normally
formatted Apple II disk.  Attempting to "repair" such a
disk with an Apple II disk repair program, like ProSel's
Mr. Fixit, will not work, since the disk is not a normal
disk.  (And Mr. Fixit only works on ProDOS disks on
a //e anyway.)

If the game disk boots and plays normally, there is nothing
"wrong" with it--it's just not in a normal Apple disk format.
Capturing the contents of such a copy-protected disk for
archiving--in such a way that it can be usably recovered--is
functionally equivalent to being able to copy it, which is
exactly what it's designers attempted to make difficult.

Your easiest strategy is to find "deprotected" ("cracked")
versions of the games you want to archive, and archive
these normally formatted versions instead.  There is no
general strategy for capturing all the information on a
copy protected disk in a usable form, since many copy
protection schemes rely on peculiarities of track and
sector positioning which are not controlled by the normal
disk writing process.

Copy II Plus and Locksmith (and several others) are
programs which were intended to control some of these
parameters to permit copying such copy protected
programs, but they often required specific parameter
settings for each game/version, and were hardly to be
considered "automatic" as soon as game manufacturers
figured out their various versions' copying strategies. ;-)

-michael

 Email:  mjmahon@aol.com
 Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/