Re: Rescuing old 5.25" disks

[sirghoul@optonline.net]

On Wed, 18 Oct 2006 21:59:43 +0100, Ben Rudiak-Gould <br276deleteme@cam.ac.uk> wrote:

>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.
>

I was never happy with Crack pages either, which is why I started doing my own cracks for my personal collection, and
will be porting them over for emulator use

>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?
>
I would venture to say the ones that nibble-count tracks cannot be converted to .nib WITHOUT alteration.

The ones that quarter-track, not at all, currently.

So, how many programs actually quarter-tracked??


John


>-- Ben

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