Re: Disk Protection

[Andy McFadden <fadden@fadden.com>]

Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:
>>It's a tedious process (especially if you only have one 5.25" drive), but
>>disks that don't use track synchronization or nibble counting will usually
>>work.
> 
> This raises the question of what fraction of protected disks do
> not employ track synchronization or nibble counting.
> 
> By my recollection, quite a number of disks were protected
> using one or the other (occasionally both) of these methods.

"Educational" software tended to have mild copy protection, while games
tended to be a little fancier.  The thing is, if the copy protection was
*that* mild, it was usually a simple matter to transfer the game to a
plain DOS or ProDOS disk, so there's no need to create a NIB file.

NIB is really only necessary/useful for non-single-load games with custom
OSs that, for whatever reason, were too difficult to convert to something
more standard.  In most cases the pirates managed to convert the software
even when something weird was going on (e.g. Broderbund's 18-sector disks,
SSI's 13-sector RDOS, SSG's 8-sector 4+4 encoded disks), so they're more
often used now for partial cracks, where the nibble counts were disabled
but the sector format left intact.

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