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I love reading the deconstruction. Those apple copy protection schemes. Pirated software always had a "cracked by" load screen. The most interesting thing to

I love reading the deconstruction. Those apple copy protection schemes. Pirated software always had a "cracked by" load screen. The most interesting thing to me were the hardware copy cards. Since most software fit in RAM, and the whole software would load at once, these cards let you push a button and make a bootable disk of whatever your computer was running. When a disk failure meant trying to find another copy somewhere there was a legit fear of loosing your software. central point software made some of these cards. A little info is available online. (Being before the internet took off, the names aren't search engine friendly.). Alaska Card Advert (why settle for copying the lower 48K.. Before they called it backup..) https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/e2/70/cd/e270cdd9028e17de61c0fd204b056884.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/e2/70/cd/e270cdd90... Bottom of this page has some interesting pictures and history of these card: http://retro.icequake.net/dob/ http://retro.icequake.net/dob/

rlonstein 11y ago
I was twelve or thirteen, had a ][e and with a copy of Beneath Apple DOS and the reference manual, and cracked a lot of software for the challenge. I wrote my own nibble copier but me and my friends pooled our money and bought Copy ][+ and Locksmith, which worked better. My favorite, and easiest, trick was to use the 64k extended memory of the 80-column card to overlay the regular memory, copy the ROM and a few low pages into it, then jump to the boot routine. Then when the disk stopped spinning, I'd hit the reset button which left me with a copy of the system at that point. Sometimes I just had to dump the program from the memory, other times I would use it to disassemble how it loaded. I had a Applied Engineering RAMWorks card (Dad heavily used AppleWorks) and I recall there being tricks around that but can't remember (rigged a couple of buttons for page swapping, I think).

rlonstein 11y ago

I was twelve or thirteen, had a ][e and with a copy of Beneath Apple DOS and the reference manual, and cracked a lot of software for the challenge. I wrote my own nibble copier but me and my friends pooled our money and bought Copy ][+ and Locksmith, which worked better. My favorite, and easiest, trick was to use the 64k extended memory of the 80-column card to overlay the regular memory, copy the ROM and a few low pages into it, then jump to the boot routine. Then when the disk stopped spinning, I'd hit the reset button which left me with a copy of the system at that point. Sometimes I just had to dump the program from the memory, other times I would use it to disassemble how it loaded. I had a Applied Engineering RAMWorks card (Dad heavily used AppleWorks) and I recall there being tricks around that but can't remember (rigged a couple of buttons for page swapping, I think).