Re: Rings of Saturn Crack Notes (warning - long post)

[Hot Rod <hotrod.apple2@gmail.com>]

Just to round this out a bit more, through an interesting sequence of events (which I'll post about later), this week I encountered another program that used this exact same DOS and protection scheme.  Same boot, same trace, same DOS/RWTS.

Except that on this other disk there was one abandoned file sitting out on a sector.  Resurrecting this file by patching the VTOC to create an entry for a BASIC program allowed it to be loaded.  The program contained this:

 10  REM  HELLO FOR 3.3.1P SYSTEM

So now there's a name for this DOS and protection scheme.  But, searching on 'DOS 3.3.1P' finds this:

"<[John Arkley] MAFISCHER> I created the Software protection dos DOS 3.3.1P for vendors and got Apple Adventure shipped"

from:

http://69.145.48.189:6502/apple2/SyndicommFTP/pub/members-only/a2/genie_archives/chat_transcripts/programming/languages/gs.basic/rtc.arkley.txt

So now we know what the DOS was called, and who created it.

I'm aware that there was a 'DOS 3.3P', but I don't know if it's the same as DOS 3.3.1P or not.  I don't remember DOS 3.3P having this type of boot, but maybe it did.  One weakness with this scheme is that if you can break into DOS/BASIC after DOS is loaded, you can then catalog the disk, load the programs, then boot a normal disk and save them out.  But that's hardly any fun.

Other than the boot, the scheme itself triggers off a control character embedded in the name of a file, uses that character to look up a value from the translate table and set that value as part of the data marker.  So a DOS call is required to properly condition the data marker for a file, rather than a direct call to RWTS (I think).

Anyway, more on the other program that used this later.

]HR