Re: Rescuing old 5.25" disks

[Ben Rudiak-Gould <br276deleteme@cam.ac.uk>]

sirghoul@optonline.net wrote:
> For the more esoteric protection schemes, cracked versions are already
> out there, and are for nearly everyone, the norm.

I know, but I don't want them to be the norm. I don't want the only
preserved version of old games to display "kracked by l33t haXXor"
prominently on the title page.

Also, I kind of like the protection schemes themselves. A lot of the
personality of the Apple II was in its noise pollution, in particular the
sound of the Disk II stepper motor. The sound of the DOS 3.3 boot sequence
is still burned in my memory, though I haven't booted a 5.25" disk in over a
decade. Some of the protection schemes made completely different sounds from
DOS, and I always wondered what arcane tricks they were using to extract
data from the disk. I'd kind of like the emulators to support all of that
some day. Call me a dreamer if you like.

> I'm saying that the existing standards - from what I've seen - seem to
> work for 99.999% of what's out there

It would be interesting to have some genuine statistics on this. There are
only finitely many copy-protected Apple II programs out there -- how many
can't be represented as .nib?

-- Ben