Re: Hardware musings

["mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

Michael J. Mahon wrote:

> I never went wild with Copy II Plus' "automatic" mode, but I
> seldom found that it worked for the disks I tried.  I therefore
> have a very poor opinion about its quality.

I had good success with it, although it tended to be a bit touchy when
copying disks that used quarter tracks, and I always did drive 2 ->
drive 1 copies in this case.

I'm mainly suggesting that it it contains a relatively reliable bank of
information regarding used tracks on a disk - I'd venture good enough
in most cases for image pruning.

> >>The image would implicitly document the protection used, and as a
> >>result pare down the data captured to a bare minimum. Putting the image
> >>back on disk then becomes more practicable.

It'd certainly be easy enough to have an emulator log what track
positions were actually used.

I have a feeling the disks that are going to be the nastiest are the
ones that appear unprotected, right up until they stop and some unusual
point. Often it's a case of data on track $23, or a sector epilogue
hack. When it's not one of those, it get's really interesting :-)

Just having a complete set of tracks, nibblized and synchronised as you
suggest, plus running them for a while through an emulator should give
the list of tracks most likely to recreate the disk successfully. Given
the relatively small amount of data by todays standards, it's probably
reasonable just to proceed as you suggest.

> > That's true. I'd like to get a feel for what software Copy II Plus
> > can't copy... Some of the later 18 sector titles might fit that
> > category, for instance Prince Of Persia
>
> For one thing, there aren't that many entries in the latest parm
> files compared to the total number of disks...

True. OK, so what do we need? An Apple II hosted imaging tool, plus one
of the popular emulators modified to load the image. That's enough to
get started, assuming a supply of willing participants with a
reasonable collection of copy protected software :-)