AppleCPM wrote:
Hi! Hi! On Apr 9, 2:17 pm, Michael wrote:Willi, Antoine was asking what the name of the *disk* was, not the name of a (nonexistent) program to convert .nib's to disks.The image file that I want to convert to a real disk is "FORT2.NIB". The funny thing is that this image file is one I created using SST and uploaded to Asimov a loooong time ago. Now, I can't find the original disk.Is there some reason that you want to preserve the non-standard format? It would probably be fairly easy to modify the disks DOS (which Antoine was asking about) to accept standard formatting, resulting in an easily archivable and copyable disk.The non-standard format is required by the Fortran compiler. That's how they implemented copy-protection.If the .nib is usable, then such a deprotection should be doable. If it is not, then it is almost certain that the .nib does not contain enough info to create a usable disk.The '.NIB' image file IS usable. The file format is UCSD Pascal and the Fortran compiler is interpreted UCSD Pascal P-code. Deprotecting it would be an interesting challenge.It is also not too difficult to create a disk with non-standard format, though the motivation for doing so is hard to fathom. ;-)"hard to fathom"? All I want is a disk that is a duplicate of the one I can't find.
By that I meant that if it were as easy to have a working disk that was in a standard format, rather than a non-standard format, wouldn't that be preferred? IIRC, the protection on the FORTRAN compiler is a couple of "bad blocks" (which are irrelevant to the program) that are read during loading and. if they do not result in an I/O error, the load is aborted. This "strategic I/O error" ploy is used as a copy protection by several Pascal-based programs. In some cases a bad checksum was used, and it appears that in others a bad epilog was used. Disassembling the p-code for the code loader and removing the test for bad blocks would be the best method of "normalizing" the disk, and it could then be used, imaged, written to a real disk, or any other use made of it. The only thing lost would be the original copy protection, which has no practical use, but might be desirable for an archival project. It would also be possible to recreate the disk without the errors, then use a nibble editor to insert the desired errors, though, of course, that would result in a non-standard disk. -michael NadaNet and AppleCrate II: parallel computing for Apple II computers! Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."