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MOOF disk image support for Floppy Emu

bigmessowires

Well-known member
MOOF! Firmware 221201M has it for the BMOW Floppy Emu, if you want to help test things. And if you're reading this sometime in the future, check for a possible newer firmware version at the BMOW site.

MOOF is a new disk image format for Macintosh floppy disks, designed by John Morris, with the goal of capturing all the low-level disk information needed for copy-protected software. It's the Macintosh equivalent of a WOZ disk image for Apple II computers. With a MOOF, you can use original floppy disks exactly as they came from the publisher, with copy protection still intact, instead of relying on cracked or modified versions. Although media-based copy protection was never as common in the Mac world as it was for Apple IIs, there's still a good amount of early software from the era of the Mac 128K, 512K, and Plus that's copy-protected. Most of them are 400K disks, but there are some 800K ones too. Archive.org has a collection of MOOFs at https://archive.org/details/moofaday

Some known issues:
  • MOOFs that use pure FLUX data are unsupported. The only example that I know is the game OIDS.
  • This MOOF implementation is read-only. A few games require writing to the disk in order to play, so although they load and run, they're not fully usable.
  • A couple of titles still don't pass the copy-protection check, for unknown reasons: The Ancient Art of War and The Surgeon. The Surgeon also fails its check with archive.org's built-in MAME environment, so it's not just Floppy Emu that has trouble with it.
  • Mac Vegas will silently fail to write to the disk, then restart or crash.
  • Some games have other requirements like only running properly on a Mac 512K, or when the disk is in the internal drive, or they require two disk drives.
Please give this a spin, and let me know of any problems you find with MOOF support, or with other disk emulation features that might have broken accidentally.
 

Andy

Well-known member
Oh I'm very excited about this! Should have some time to test next week on an SE and IIci
 

LaPorta

Well-known member
I’ll have to try this. I’ve got an AppleSauce and I’ve been making my own images…excited!
 

Mu0n

Well-known member
I'm extremely grateful for this and have tried it out this morning. This marks the end of a very long journey of mine which started in 2004 when the nostalgia bug hit me hard and I fired up the old family mac plus and discovered Mac emulation. My Winter Games disk was lost and I wanted to try it out again.
I scoured the web, Mac garden, old ftp sites, random websites, hotline servers from within basilisk ii and could never find Winter Games anywhere and if I found It, it was a non working carelessly made disk image that wasn't tested by its creator.

When the image eventually turned up on Mac Garden in 2009, most people couldn't use it because it always crashed at the splash screen. The best one could do was to own a physical working copy and at best, diskdup other working copies. The only way this could be transmitted was by handing it out or snail mail. Very frustrating. An Italian cracked (but incomplete iirc) version eventually turned up but that didn't satisfy me and most people. It's only just a few years ago that an emulation working cracked version of the game could be uncovered. If only moofs had been available all those years ago!

I'm very excited by this format and I've tried a bunch more this morning.
I hope Déjà Vu (from Rubicon soft, not from Mindscape/ICOM) is made available as a moof.i have the original disk and the best I could do was dupe other booting, working physical copies. It's a neat little tile memory game, perfect for a young child's first contact with a computer with a mouse.
 

bigmessowires

Well-known member
Awesome! I think John is currently sold out of Applesauce units, but if you can get one (or enlist help from somebody who has one) then you could make a MOOF of that Déjà Vu disk.
 

LaPorta

Well-known member
I’m always up for making an A2R (and corresponding MOOF) for anyone with my AppleSauce if they want to send me the disk.
 

Mu0n

Well-known member
I'm based in Canada and sending non-paper correspondance across to the US has shot up in price and has to be sent as a package now since early 2021. Anyone in Canada with an AppleSauce?
 
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