Alkemstone.... cracked (and another funny coincidence)

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

Greetings,

Another of the remaining nibbles copies in my disk collection was Alkemstone.  The copy I had was pretty much a straight Advanced Demuffin job, as it only had modified epilogue bytes (AA DE instead of DE AA, and the one little routine around that).  But, when I converted the disk, I encountered some legitimate errors reading a few sectors.  Most of those sectors contained no data, except for about three of them.

So, I went searching for another image to try and borrow a few sectors and stitch back together an intact copy.  Lo and behold, I found that Asimov has a nibble image of it.  But only a nibble image.  Hmm.

I thought I could just run Advanced Demuffin over the nibble image, grab the few sectors I needed and be done.  But the nibble image from Asimov wouldn't read using the RWTS from my copy of it.  So then I took a closer look at the Asimov nibble image and found that it's actually using.... DOS 3.3.1P. Wow.  Third time this week, and all from the same era.

Now armed with this info, I just grabbed the RWTS from Rings of Saturn and did the Advanced Demuffin with it instead.  The protected sectors and modified marker value on this DOS 3.3.1P version of Alkemstone were:

Side 1 sectors:
Track 5, sectors E, F [D3]

Side 2 sectors:
Track 9, sectors E, F	[B7]
Track A, sectors E, F	[CF]
Track B, sectors E, F	[CF]
Track E, sectors E, F	[CF]
Track F, sectors D, E, F	[D7]
Track 10, sectors C, D, E, F	[D3]

I then put Pronto-DOS on both sides, and then there was just one little tweak to make to the RWTSIOB. program on side 2 (since it was still calling the DOS 3.3.1P RWTS entry at $B6D5, I changed it to $BD00).

I also did a hex compare to the version I had previously demuffined that was protected with the other DOS, and everything matched except for the bad sectors (and my patch).  And the file on side two called RAM3.; the Asimov version was a slightly different length, so it looked like they revised it a bit.

Now I'm really wondering what ELSE used this DOS 3.3.1P stuff.  If there are any other uncracked titles out there stuck behind it, it's no problem normalizing them at this point.

I've uploaded the cracked version to Asimov (clean copy too).

]HR