Software on Old Disks

["Great Hierophant" <great_hierophant@hotmail.com>]

Floppy Disks can just as easily be labeled fragile disks.  Their
lightweight construction can make the disk easily unreadable.  Bending,
warping, physical abuse, coming apart.  Then the media itself was not
designed with longevity in mind.  Bit-rot is virtually inevitable, and
can be caused or facilitated by dust, dirt, mold, extreme temperatures,
humidity, finger oils, stratches, tears, overuse, crushed in a stack,
electromagnetic fields, kept too long in the disk drive.  But even the
best kept disks are not immune from time, but they seemingly have so
little of it.

The only way to buy software these days is to receive a guarantee that
it works and was used recently.  However, with software that uses
several disks or sides, the user may never realized that a lesser-used
but vital side no longer works.  (Disk integrity programs may assist to
an extent, but not if the problem has turned a 0 into a 1 or vice
versa.)

The are two difficult problems to easy disk backup and transfer.  The
first is copy protection.  It was designed to make copying difficult,
if not impossible.  To effectively back-up a program, you have to
essentially eliminate the copy protection without also making the
program non-fucntional.  Next is a related problem.  Many programs use
either custom OSes or modify Apple DOS and ProDOS to their own, often
copy protected ends.  Other times, the programers sought to do
something the standard DOSs were not designed to do or to do it faster.
 Easy transfer of programs is best served through converting the
program to DOS 3.3 or preferably ProDOS.  ProDOS supports things like
directories and hard drives, DOS 3.3 does not.  Of course, while you
could use unformatted disks to transfer programs to, hard drives (even
at 32MB) are far faster, convenient and durable.  Finally, to do
something of this magnitude some serious 6502 assembly /disassembly is
required.  

What can be done?