Re: Toy Shop for Apple II available and a long story

[rich.martin@gmail.com]

On Thursday, June 21, 2012 7:58:15 PM UTC-4, Hot Rod wrote:
> On Tuesday, January 10, 2012 10:47:57 PM UTC-6, datawiz wrote:
> > Finally, while this game would have been difficult to crack back in
> > those days, there
> > is an approach that could have been used to distribute a working copy.
> > A program
> > could be written to read a track on a protected disk, and save it's
> > nibbles out.
> > A separate program would be written to re-assemble the nibble images
> > back into a
> > disk that has a non-standard format that would work (assuming the
> > crackist removed
> > secondary protection in the nibblized images). 
> 
> Just to add a bit to your archeology, IIRC, this approach was taken initially on Wings of Fury by "Mr. Slick" (back in the day).  See here:
> 
> http://www.textfiles.com/apple/DOCUMENTATION/conversion
> 
> except rather than nibble images, compression was used to "pack" and "unpack" the data (as compression was called within the Apple II circles then).  But the result was a working 18-sector version.  He also provided a copy utility that could be further generalized for other programs.  [The fixation to get everything back to 16-sector format likely missed the opportunity to pursue preserving use of the 18-sector format and just working around it.]
> 
> ]HR

THE Hot Rod? The ORIGINAL Hot Rod?
Amazing! Mind reaching out to me directly via email? I'd like to ask you a couple questions regarding ye olde days of the Apple II underground.

Regards,
Rich