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Getting an AppleSauce

Skate323k137

Well-known member
That's great to hear. Sounds like a great device for continued preservation and I'm glad it sounds like at least eventually you should get write ability too :)
 

LaPorta

Well-known member
Small update: my sync sensor is working well, overhauled SuperDrive is in good shape, and imaging is progressing. Just made some Flux images of the original Mac Plus floppies. Thankfully my copies I appear to be in extremely good shape, with no errors. This is actually pretty fun!
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
@LaPorta Just be careful! It gives me "the bug" to search for more and more early copy protected Mac software regardless if it's a game or app I even want. :D
 

Skate323k137

Well-known member
@LaPorta Just be careful! It gives me "the bug" to search for more and more early copy protected Mac software regardless if it's a game or app I even want. :D
I can totally get that. I'm glad to see stuff preserved regardless.

I check every arcade PCB I get to make sure any EPROMS on it have already been contributed to MAME. Hopefully more people start making quality archival copies of disk images in the same manner... if you can't find it online, make an image of it.
 

LaPorta

Well-known member
That’s great that you can do that. I may contact you for newly burned Street Fighter II CE ROMs if the originals in my machine ever crap out!
 

LaPorta

Well-known member
@LaPorta Just be careful! It gives me "the bug" to search for more and more early copy protected Mac software regardless if it's a game or app I even want. :D
Well I figure I can do my part for the games I have. Even if it isn’t copy protected, it’s nice to have a real nuts and bolts copy.
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
I don't have an EPROM burner. I really need to get one at some point. But I doubt very much my arcades have any rare revision ROMs.
 

Skate323k137

Well-known member
I don't have an EPROM burner. I really need to get one at some point. But I doubt very much my arcades have any rare revision ROMs.
Yeah, I hear ya. I have only contributed a couple, but it's neat when you find something undumped.

There's a whole thread on here about picking a burner : https://www.arcade-projects.com/thr...ammer-for-most-arcade-hobbyists-to-have.4046/

For older stuff a TL866II Plus is fine, but if you need to do 42 pin chips (27c160, 27c322) I strongly suggest getting a burner with a big enough ZIF to handle it natively. The TL866 requires some banking tricks to program larger chips and I am just not here for that. I use a Top3000 for most EPROMS, but I can't say I've had any problems with the TL866 either for the couple chips I have done on it. I actually bought the TL866 because it can test a lot of 74LS* series logic chips and my more expensive programmers didn't have support for that. It came in handy though when the IC code in someones github project had the project file from the TL866 windows application, instead of the actual .hex, for the PIC I was programming.
 

powermax

Well-known member
Hmm...I made a copy of this game, Balance of Power. Copied fine. Made a DC42 image of it. Wrote that sucessfully to a floppy. Game won't run on my SE because it is an "unauthorized copy." I guess I really do need to wait it out!
Disk Copy images can't store low level details of a floppy disk so they can't be used for preserving copy protected games.
That's why a2r, WOZ and a couple of other formats exist.

Copy protection software usually violate the low level floppy formats on purpose in order to make protected disks look "unique" from the SW POV. Early copy protection disks used to have a drilled hole that could be checked for existence in SW.
Later copy protection schemes rely on low-level formatting because drilling physical holes has been proven to be too expensive.
That's actually good news for us because capturing low-level format anomalies is easier and cheaper than trying to make a hole at some precise location.

Apple Sauce is great at copying copy protected GCR disks but it falls short on MFM ones.
That said, the most copy protected SW of the 90s came on MFM formatted floppies nobody can copy yet.
The most widespread copy protection tools that use MFM disks as "keys" have been developed at Pace Antipiracy Inc.
While it's still not possible to clone their key disks I hope it's meanwhile possible to image them.

Anyway, go ahead and image all your original floppies. MAME has some support for the WOZ formats so you'll be able to run your images in a virtual 68k Mac.

I could add support for the WOZ format to DingusPPC though it will be of little avail there because the Pace tools of the 90s - MacEncrypt III and Interlok - only accept MFM formatted key floppies. Earlier Pace tools won't run in a Power Macintosh...
 
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cheesestraws

Well-known member
I'd also note that writing flux back to a disc is significantly harder than reading it from a disc, because you're fighting physics to a certain extent. My greaseweazle, for example, will let you attempt to write the flux back but the result very rarely actually works properly. So the cynic in me suspects that there may be a technical reason or two behind the legal concerns, as well.
 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
I've read all manner of really interesting things in this thread, but found not a single recommended link to extra-thread information about it.
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
I'd also note that writing flux back to a disc is significantly harder than reading it from a disc, because you're fighting physics to a certain extent. My greaseweazle, for example, will let you attempt to write the flux back but the result very rarely actually works properly. So the cynic in me suspects that there may be a technical reason or two behind the legal concerns, as well.
The MOOF format is designed to convert a flux image into a useable Disk Copy style image that includes metadata to describe disk contents (such as not-really-bad-blocks-but-useable-data used in copy protection.) That way it gets to skip the pesky physics. :)
 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
The MOOF format is designed to convert a flux image into a useable Disk Copy style image that includes metadata to describe disk contents (such as not-really-bad-blocks-but-useable-data used in copy protection.) That way it gets to skip the pesky physics. :)

Sorry, I should have quoted earlier posts about writing flux back to discs. I didn't mean that in the context of MOOF :)
 
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