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Re: Backing up Larry
sicklittlemonkey wrote:
I think ultimately it might be very rad to have a nibble copier in
prodos that can generate a .dsk or .nib image file directly.
That's exactly what SST does. It's based on EDD, I think. You copy a
disk and "pack" it onto 2 initialised (i.e. wiped) floppy sides. Then
you use ADT to send those to a PC, and run SST inside an emulator to
"unpack" the .DSKs into a .NIB image.
Yes, but it was done back when nibble counts and changed address marks
were considered pretty good protection. .NIB is *way* out of date for
anything involving synchronized tracks, half tracks, spiral recording,
bit stuffing, "soft" nibbles, etc.
The only catches are that you have to know which tracks to copy, and
possibly modify the .NIB to work in an emulator. I'm trying to find
time to work out how to handle half tracks in the case of Borg.
I now believe using the .NIB format is the best option for preserving
original disks, even if we have to patch them to use whole (instead of
half) tracks or ignore nibble counts.
I disagree. For all practical purposes, if you are going to completely
reverse-engineer the copy protection and change all the read routines
that handle it, you might just as well normalize the disk, so anyone
can use it easily.
After all, you aren't *required* to add a crack screen! Every game was
first a normal disk, and it played just like the copy protected one.
The *only* difference would be the noises that the drive makes as it
reads the disk. ;-)
-michael
Music synthesis for 8-bit Apple II's!
Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it is seriously underused."