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Re: Hardware musings
Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:
Michael J. Mahon wrote:
No matter how many different things you can pre-program for the external
drive to do, there will always be another program that uses *another*
scheme that you haven't thought of.
Well, no one is developing new protection schemes for the Disk II, as
far as I know. So it doesn't matter what the Disk II is capable of; it
only matters which of those capabilities were ever used. Surely that
simplifies the problem a little bit.
In principle, but I'm not aware of any complete "catalog" of the
methods used, and often the same title was protected in different
ways in different "printings".
The problem is that only human intelligence can determine which way
a particular disk is *actually* used.
If you want to save a minimal amount of data, then you'll have to
manually determine--through extensive testing, since a failed copy
may not show up until later in a game--exactly what needs to be on
the disk (or image) to satisfy the program.
The only practical way to avoid this hard work is to save everything
that could *possibly* be used by a program, and that takes considerably
more space and time (to create).
If you want a "general purpose" tool, then I think the latter approach
is the only one that will work. As I've said, I think that involves
saving every nibble readable on every quarter-track, together with
lists of all the "soft" bits on those tracks.
Only the protected program itself can recover the "meaning" of that
data, which it does in the process of actual execution.
-michael
NadaNet networking for Apple II computers!
Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
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