Re: Hardware musings

["BLuRry" <brendan.robert@gmail.com>]

> No matter what you "measure" about the characteristics of the disk, it
> will still be mostly human judgement that decides what is "relevant".
> (Though I still have some hope for an emulator that "observes" what the
> protected program does with the disk, assuming that some human is able
> to "drive" the program through all its states--solving the game, looking
> in all rooms, picking up game pieces in every possible order....  Hmm,
> sounds hard.  ;-)

Maybe not to the fullest extent of what you've described (after all,
you might just discover program bugs doing that), but running the game
a few times in an emulator that supports the full to-the-extreme bit
copy format would be useful.  Just log what areas of the disk were used
by the virtual controller.  Sounds pretty easy to me, since all you
have to do is track what phyical bit was read from disk when the
softswitch value was consulted by the program.  The rest is garbage-in,
garbage-out.  You can cull the unused bits in the image by zero-filling
them so that the image compresses better.

Or you can flog me for over-simplifying things.  I like to avoid
writing lots of code. :-)