Re: WildCard By Central Point Question

[Dick Sisco <dsisco11@mchsi.com>]

On Fri, 07 Feb 2003 16:52:42 GMT, Andy McFadden <fadden@fadden.com>
wrote:

>Bryan Villados <news002@macgeek.org> wrote:
>> I have a weird question... How did software companies produce the original
>> diskettes with the copy protection applied? Did they own proprietary
>> hardware that enabled them to manufacture the diskettes? Obviously they
>> didn't use things like Locksmith or EDD to mass-produce the diskettes. And
>> software that utilized things like SpiraDisc must have some method of making
>> the master disk.
>
>You could write Spira-Disc with a standard drive.  With custom software
>you could write the tracks with the correct timing.  With a hard drive
>or a RAM extender installed you could store the image locally for multiple
>writes.
>
>There were mass duplication devices back then, but I don't know how
>flexible they were.  Never underestimate the manufacturing power of
>ten Apple IIs manned by interns. :-)

They were quite flexible.  Very little you couldn't lay down with the
best of them.  The whole idea of sophisticated copy protection
(protection you needed Locksmith or a wildcard for) was to put a
signature on the disk that a normal drive/controller couldn't easily
reproduce.

There were large, expensive machines like the Foremaster and the Trace
with multiple drives running faster than normal and fed by
autoloaders.  Larger companies had their own duplicating machines.
Smaller companies that wanted to use copy protection would send their
masters to a Disk Duplication Company to copy (and probably even label
and package).

Those machines could control intersector and intertrack gaps down to
the bit level.  You always wrote a track at a time, so intersector
gaps were always the same.  You still had to have a track splice, but
you didn't have to put it in the same place that the normal controller
put it. You could even put down bit sequences that were "illegal", e.
g. eight bits of no-signal in a row.

There were also small machines with a single autoloader that had some
facility for copy protection.  The only one I ever used (the
"Ghostwriter" from Trace) could not, but I recall advertisements for
one that could (ALF, ALP, or something like that).

There was nothing special about the drives, but the controllers where
specially designed.

I suppose it would be possible to do it with Locksmith  and "ten Apple
IIs manned by interns"  (you'd only have to use bit copy for the
signature track) but I didn't know of any companies that were doing
it.

Dick Sisco