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ExperLogo!

Crutch

Well-known member
This for me is like a very tiny holy grail … I’ve been looking for this for years but have never seen it anywhere, so finding it shrink wrapped is a special treat. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you … NIB ExperLogo. I purchased it on eBay recently and it was not cheap, but frankly I probably would have paid ten times as much.

This was a terrific complied Logo platform from ExperTelligence which I used as a young kid circa 1985. I vividly remember how, much like the original Disk Copy, it took over the screen buffer when compiling, filling the screen with random garbage to save memory on a 128k Mac! It also had fantastic turtle (called “bunny” because the system, being compiled, was quite fast) graphics, including 3D and spherical geometry versions, and offered full access to the Mac Toolbox and ROM as well as various LISP-like AI-friendly features (that’s in the ‘80s sense of the term “AI,” of course).

To my knowledge it is not currently preserved on any archival site anywhere (perhaps because it was copy protected). I am really excited to see if the disk inside is good, and if perhaps the copy protection is beatable for preservation purposes. I will take a look this weekend!
 

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pax

Well-known member
I hope to be able to make a similar post one day with MacScheme+Toolsmith. 😅
 

Huxley

Well-known member
This is so cool - congrats! I'd love to play with this too, should you ever get a working copy uploaded to The Garden (or any of the similar archive sites).
 

3lectr1cPPC

Well-known member
I’m definitely going to want to try this out in Mini vMac if you can manage to get disk dumps of this! It looks super interesting and I would love to try making some cool old logos with it. (Maybe it will run on my PowerBook 170 when I get that thing booting?)
 

Crutch

Well-known member
It is an awesome piece of software. I will probably dump the disk this weekend, but it will need some hacking because it is definitely copy protected and I probably won’t get to that for another few weeks due to another current project.

Sadly it won’t run on your PB170: this is old software. I know it doesn’t run on a Mac II. I’m not even sure it will run on a 512KE or Plus. It runs great on a 128k Mac or a Fat Mac, though. :)
 

Crutch

Well-known member
The copy protection was quite interesting by the way: it won’t let you run the master disk. You have to make a copy, and then periodically insert the master.
 

3lectr1cPPC

Well-known member
Interesting! Unfortunately ExperTelligence probably wasn't thinking about the people nearly 40 years later that would want to be able to dump the disks :)

Hopefully Mini vMac will be able to run it. If not, oh well.
 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
The copy protection was quite interesting by the way: it won’t let you run the master disk. You have to make a copy, and then periodically insert the master.

That's unusual and pretty sensible (though perhaps it just means that only one part of the master disk will wear out, the crucial part, rather than all of it)
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
@Crutch Several of us has flux level imagers. So if you're comfortable with lending the disks, one of us could make master images that can include the copy protection when copied.

Edit: Alternatively, you can try using DiskDup. It might be able to make a clean copy if you tell it to include "unused" and "bad" sectors.
 

Crutch

Well-known member
Good call I’ll try that. The disk is good (excellent!), the files all copied over but it looks like it indeed uses bad sector copy protection so Disk Copy won’t make an image (as you inferred). There is one invisible file that can’t be copied. The good news is, that suggests the copy protection will be extremely easy to bypass for preservation purposes.
 

pax

Well-known member
The copy protection was quite interesting by the way: it won’t let you run the master disk. You have to make a copy, and then periodically insert the master.
I think I remember Deja Vu II asking for the master disk periodically in a similar manner. You can run the game from disk, but the manual instructs you to copy the game file to HD and insert the master disk when asked. You can’t copy the disk in any of the usual programs I think, due to the copy protection.
 
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