Re: How to crack Apple Panic (Broderbund, 1981)

[Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co>]

I kind-of cheated, and my result, when compressed, is 15 sectors or about 
4K bigger than the original crack when compressed...

Still, I was able to extract the animation from CRACKER-JACK's version and 
the blank logo from LoGo's version, tack on a little code to play the 
animation and pause.  The pause is about the same length as his, though 
done differently.

It might be possible to use the core to do the dirty work of creating the 
Brøderbund logo.

When loaded, the "APPLE PANIC TITLE" starts at 26FD.  At 2800.3FFF is the 
code in question, which is relocated to 0800.1FFF.  I overwrote the 
resulting 1015-101C with NOPs.  Then I trapped the disk crack on memory 
access to C057, dropped the 2000.3FFF memory region, and quit the 
emulation.  Opened a blank DOS disk, reloaded both these chunks at their 
final location (i.e., the headcrab animation from APPLE PANIC TITLE at 
0800 and the screen image at 2000), then...

]CALL -151
*07FD: 4C 00 10
*BSAVE HEADCRAB, A$07FD, L$3803

Extracted that.

Booted again the disk crack, trapping on execution pointer $4000.  Saved 
from 4000-A7FF to a file.

Then I assembled this code...

          .org      $07FD
entry:    jmp       start
          .incbin   "HEADCRAB#0607fd", $0003
          .incbin   "apanic-4000.bin"
start:    jsr       $1000     ; init screen, do headcrab animation
          lda       #$00
          tax
          tay
@1:       inx
          bne       @1
          iny
          bne       @1
          clc
          adc       #$01
          cmp       #$08
          bcc       @1
          jmp       $4000

Boomshakalaka.  If I can further optimize this - and I prolly can - I'll 
see if I can make the file crunch better.

-uso.