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:
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.