Apple II Software Question

[khannonnd]

Hey there,

5.25" floppies are not getting any younger.  I just got my first Apple II system (a IIc) and am starting to look on eBay for software.  How do you guys backup the software in the unfortunate, but progressively more likely, event the disk goes bad?

 

[NJRoadfan]

ADTPro makes the process easy. Disks are imaged direct to a modern machine. FWIW, almost all common commercial titles have been backed up/preserved/deprotected. There is still some obscure software out there that hasn't been backed up.

 

[olePigeon]

Yep.  ADTPro is typically used for backing up non-copy protected Apple II software.

The only way to make backups of copy protected software is to use something like KyroFlux or DiscFerret.

 

[Gorgonops]

The only way to make backups of copy protected software is to use something like KyroFlux or DiscFerret.

Or, let's be honest, there's a really good chance that most any given piece of originally protected software now exists in a cracked version on one of the various Apple II software archives. (That *can* be written out to a new disk via ADTPro or whatnot.) There might be some stuff left out there that's resisted cracking but I imagine it's a short list of mostly rare and obscure software.

For day-to-day use I'd definitely recommend you work out a workflow for generating Apple II disks (which should be easy with a IIc, as it has an ADTPro-compatible serial port built in) and run generated copies for most of what you do. These days the reason generally sited for buying originals is in order to collect the manuals, boxes, etc, not the floppies themselves.

 

[Elfen]

DOS 3.3 used to have DiskCopy utility to copy floppies and files from disk to disk, and one called "Muffin" used to copy "copy protected" floppies onto other floppies by recreating the errors on the media as best as possible. It could copy almost anything (from floppy to floppy)! But DiskCopy would be better if you were copying to a hard drive, lets say. "Copy Protected" stuff you are stuck with the media you have unless you went in with a sector editor and disassembler and hacked out the protection codes from the programs, and then you can file copy the disk.

 

[techknight]

I am unfamiliar on how copy protected AII disks work, cant you just do a raw sector-by-sector copy iwth the apple 2? 

 

[Gorgonops]

The Apple II's disk system, being largely software driven, lets a sufficiently evil person do all sorts of hideous things to make a disk hard to copy. Apple II drives, for instance, are capable of writing "half tracks" (and even under certain circumstances, "quarter tracks") because the stepper motors are directly controlled and it takes multiple pulses to move the heads to the "official" non-overlapping positions. Likewise, since bytes to be written to the disk are encoded in software an author that really wants to make their disk inscrutable could use a different GCR translation table (or, indeed, just use FM encoding). The creators of copy-protected software would essentially implement their own DOSes to handle whatever bizzare format they cooked up, leaving only a few sectors at the start of the disk readable by normal means. For an example of what was possible with the Disk ][ hardware see the "Spiradisc" format used by Sierra On-Line

Anyway, these sorts of disks do a great job resisting the efforts of simple sector-by-sector copy programs. Your choices were basically:

1: Figure out (via reverse engineering a RAM dump of the disk code) the ugly details of the format and write a *specific* program to copy it, or

2: "Crack" the program by capturing it from RAM and patching it into a normal executable format loadable from DOS. This is what most hackers ended up doing in the end. Which is a good thing because those bizarre disk formats weren't particularly emulator friendly either.

 

[Tiptoeturtle]

I think a card called Wildcard could take snapshots of RAM to capture (onto diskette) a live specimen of an executing copy protected programme. Wildcard had a lead running to a push button that hung out the back of the computer. Something like a cable shutter release on a camera. However, success when using the Wildcard was not assured.

 

[Elfen]

I remember Wild Card, and yes, it was not perfect. Muffin (it is rumored that Woz had a hand in programming some of the routines in it) was more reliable, but in the worst of cases, it could take an hour to copy a floppy disk, as Gorgonops stated with half an quarter track copying. I remember Sierra Online's protection; I worked at First Star Software during those years. Though I was a "Commodore & Atari Boy" I did a lot of the 6502 programming for other systems then, including Apple II. I had a simple yet evil copy protection scheme that left the disk normal but the files on it were laid as such that it sounded like your disk drive was formatting the disk! Thing is this - laying out the file on the disk in a certain pattern took a specific amount of time to load compared to other patterns including normal ones. So file copying the disk destroys the pattern and changes the timing so the program refuses to work. One way out of it was to sector copy the disk and then you could have a working copy. or you can look through the games' file loading routines and eliminate the timing comparison routines.

There were several other "Disk Cracker/Copier" programs out there, some more specific to a certain protection schemes than others. I remember Muffin because it was the Big Apple User Group's #1 Disk Utility because it could copy virtually any disk.

Even in the 68K Mac days, there were some copy protected disks out there and if you wanted to it to your brand spanking new 5MB hard drive - you can to call the company and pay a small fee to get a working non-copy-protected version of it.

 

[Tiptoeturtle]

. I had a simple yet evil copy protection scheme that left the disk normal but the files on it were laid as such that it sounded like your disk drive was formatting the disk! Thing is this - laying out the file on the disk in a certain pattern took a specific amount of time to load compared to other patterns including normal ones. So file copying the disk destroys the pattern and changes the timing so the program refuses to work.

??? So that was you was it ???

Another copy protection scheme I can think of, not sure if anyone used it, was to take a paper punch and make neat holes in the diskette platter, in free disk space.

 

[Elfen]

You can tell if it's mine because the drive sounds like it is formatting the disk! In actuality, it was timed to load the program from the way the sectors were patterned in about 75 seconds. Any other pattern made it load faster. LOL!

Lotus, makers of Lotus 1-2-3, used laser holes on certain tracks.