Re: Hardware musings

["mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

BLuRry wrote:

> Yikes!  If there are such titles, and they can't be backed up in .nib
> format because they're too far off the mark, then how have these things
> survived for so long that they can still be backed up and/or hopefully
> replicated?

Of course, virtually every title has been cracked and placed on
unprotected media by now, and the unprotected images are all on asimov,
etc. So yes, your approach would work quite well, assuming unprotected
titles are all you're after.

What I'd like to do, is be able to capture the copy-protected original
disk images. The way I envisage this working is aforementioned device,
interfaced with an emulator, and using Copy II plus to create 'perfect'
images of them.

> Going really far on a limb:
> In theory, there's no such things as inifinity or impossibility with
> this stuff -- just things that are really darn difficult to fathom
> until you can wrap your head around them and break the problem into
> small simpler problems.  Remember, we're not talking about going
> through the disk II controller board, or an IWM chip.  So what else
> would it take to capture these oddly formatted disks?

What's required is an interface to a modern PC that has deterministic
timing. The actual hardware isn't that hard to build, but getting it to
work in an emulator using an interface like USB and the associated
operating system level delays - now that's a challenge.

One thing that would help is figuring out the maximum data rate the
disk II controller can feed data to the Apple II bus, and experimenting
to see if full-speed USB (1.0, not 2.0) can manage this timing, but I
have serious doubts.

Matt