On Wed, 18 Oct 2006, Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:
I know, but I don't want them to be the norm. I don't want the only preserved version of old games to display "kracked by l33t haXXor" prominently on the title page.
Me neither.Even for single-file games I hate 'tro branding. I'd crack a .nib or something myself, if I could get a pure version. And I've *removed* branding from Ms. Pac-Man. (It's the version on Apple Crunch.)
Anyone got nibs or dsks of Atarisoft games? Hell, I'll try cracking them myself, if not with applepc, I got so many emus it's unreal and a few do have good debuggers.
Also, I kind of like the protection schemes themselves. A lot of the personality of the Apple II was in its noise pollution, in particular the sound of the Disk II stepper motor. The sound of the DOS 3.3 boot sequence is still burned in my memory, though I haven't booted a 5.25" disk in over a decade. Some of the protection schemes made completely different sounds from DOS, and I always wondered what arcane tricks they were using to extract data from the disk. I'd kind of like the emulators to support all of that some day. Call me a dreamer if you like.
I once put a crude "knocker" into my emulator, making a short chirp every time the head moved (and a different sound if it banged against the wall). Not exactly the right sound, but it did kind-of sound like the familiar hissing and scratching of a disk ][. Booted a ProDOS disk, heard the familiar "BEEP-ss-ss-ss ss ss ss CLICK" almost exactly as I remembered it.
-uso.