4 ms·

Copy protection on my Apple II was simple for me as a kid, all I needed was a pair of scissors! Or was that to make the disk writable...

sbf501 4y ago
You still needed programs like Copy ][+ and Locksmith. For example, common strategies were half and quarter track writes: shifting the head a small amount, which makes the disk unreadable by the system function calls, but not by its own bootloader, which is why it could run but you couldn't copy the disk with the Dos 3.3 tools (or ProDOS tools). The two programs I mentioned could be configured to offset the head, allowing you to "break" the protection.
ddingus 4y ago
That was to make the disk writable. There was a copy protection on the Atari computers that was actually super simple. Having hacked on some games on the Apple, I decided to give the Atari machines a go, and those did a very interesting thing when loading software, and that thing was to make sound. One beep sound per sector! Ultima II was protected using the "bad sector" method. Basically, the commercial disk was mastered in such a way that a sector, or group of them, would fail to read properly. Users could not make these disks easily, and that was the protection. I was about to start disassembling the program and decided to try something: Booting the official disk highlighted a bad read some number of reads in. You could hear it. Beep, beep, beep, bfzfzfzfzf [pause], beep, beep, beep... My solution was to just open the disk drive door at the right time. Count the beeps, open door, let errors happen close door, play game. I never did begin to disassemble that game on Atari machines. :D
- NonNefarious 4y ago
  Ha, I remember that. The more-clever Atari copy protection involved the publishers using a customized drive to write two consecutive sectors with the same sector number. The loading program would request that sector twice in succession, so as the drive head finished reading the first one it would immediately read the second... which had different contents. If you simply duplicated the disk, the drive would not read the sector twice and you'd be missing critical data. There was a chip you could install in your Atari drive called the Happy Enhancement to defeat this.
  - mwexler 4y ago
    I added this one to my 810. Screwed it up when I did it myself (note: 1st time ever soldering should not be done on your one and only disk drive) and got the folks at Happy to fix my botched job. The chip was really interesting: it basically gave extremely low level access to the drive to copy protected disks, but it was also leverged by their "Warp" disk operating system which was both faster than the Atari system and also was able to read wonky disks that the regular drives hiccuped on.
    - NonNefarious 4y ago
      I respect the effort! I still have my 800, Trak drive, and Commodore 1702. Mint condish. The 1702 needs to be re-capped, though, for sure. Last time I tried it, the shape of the picture was wonky.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  > My solution was to just open the disk drive door at the right time. Count the beeps, open door, let errors happen close door, play game. I found a "funny" like that with an Ensoniq Mirage that had been fitted with a PC floppy drive. "Modern" PC floppy drives use a /DISKCHANGE pin that goes low when a disk is in and "chucked" on the motor spindle but the head hasn't moved off the end stop. As soon as the head moves, /DISKCHANGE goes high. "Old fashioned" Shugart drives use the same pin for /READY, which is low when there's a disk in the drive and the motor is at speed. The Mirage software checks for /READY at the start of any disk read or write, but once it's running it doesn't bother. It just keeps going until every sector is read, whether the disk is ready or not. If you pop the disk out halfway through a read, eventually it'll fail because it can't find the sector, not because the disk is no longer ready. If you use a PC floppy, it'll start to read the first time you put a disk in, but any subsequent ones will fail because the head has moved so /READY is no longer low. So what was happening was it would boot, <CLUNK TUNK TUNK TUNK TUNK TUNK TUNK TUNK TUNK TUNK TUNK> as it zeroed the head and read in ten tracks, then sit there flashing ".n.d" meaning "No Disk" when it tried to load the first sample, because it loads the OS, does some internal tasks, then loads a sample off the disk. The head has moved, the disk is no longer ready, it thinks you've got no disk in. Worse, because the software expects a bunch of things to be loaded into RAM, pressing more or less anything except "LOAD" will crash it as it reads garbage where it should read jump tables. So, for quite a while now, I let it load the OS, then in the half a second it's clearing RAM and tuning the filters, I hit the eject button and pop the disk back in. One day I'll either get the right drive, make an adaptor for the drive, or patch the OS to solve the problem ;-)
  - ddingus 4y ago
    That's a good one! Operator addendum: plz eject disk and quickly insert again... I have an old laptop with some dev tools on it that also runs XP. I use it lightly and it has a bad fan. Set to entirely passive cooling? Nope. BIOS wants to see the fan spin, so... Sitting near that laptop is one of those computer air cans. At power on, wait about a second, shoot fan with air, BIOS sees spin, system check passes and just don't run the machine past passive cooling limits.
- abrookewood 4y ago
  Most copy programs would ignore those bad sectors and so they wouldn't be on the copies. But you could actually use a sector editor to write the bad sectors to copied disk and that was usually enough to make them work.
bruce511 4y ago
So I think you are referring to the notch on the side of the disk. If it was present the disk was writable, if not then read only. It was common to write-protect a disk using a small sticky label, folded over the notch. From memory, disks came with these labels. We also found out you could add a notch on the other side, and use the disk upside down (ie as a second disk) thus doubling the storage value of each disk. All magazine materials explained why this was a bad idea, lead to data corruption etc, but it worked well and so we ignored the warnings. This became so popular that I remember owning a punch literally made for this exact purpose. It positioned the disk in the right place and cut a perfect square notch. So this practice was wide-spread enough that someone actually designed and produced a tool to do it. But yeah, in the early days, we used scissors (very carefully).
- toast0 4y ago
  Any chance you still have the punch? I got a box of double sided disks that were intended for a double sided drive, so only had notches on one side... Would be lovely to notch 100 disks the easy way.
  - yourapostasy 4y ago
    There are still some stores that sell these "floppy disk notchers" [1] if you're feeling really nostalgic for authentic vintage units, and occasionally they'll pop up on the usual auction sites. Or you can 3D print yourself one these days [2]. I was too poor to get a real notcher, so made do with an X-acto knife and a cardboard template I would create over and over. By the time I could afford a notcher, the muscle memory was etched into my fingers and hands, and I never bothered to get one. [1] https://retro8bitshop.com/product/floppy-disk-notcher/ https://retro8bitshop.com/product/floppy-disk-notcher/ [2] https://www.instructables.com/5-14-Floppy-Disk-Notcher/ https://www.instructables.com/5-14-Floppy-Disk-Notcher/
  - bruce511 4y ago
    It might be buried in a box somewhere, but I doubt it. This was pushing 40 years ago now .... :)
  - 4y ago

sbf501 4y ago

You still needed programs like Copy ][+ and Locksmith. For example, common strategies were half and quarter track writes: shifting the head a small amount, which makes the disk unreadable by the system function calls, but not by its own bootloader, which is why it could run but you couldn't copy the disk with the Dos 3.3 tools (or ProDOS tools). The two programs I mentioned could be configured to offset the head, allowing you to "break" the protection.

ddingus 4y ago

That was to make the disk writable. There was a copy protection on the Atari computers that was actually super simple. Having hacked on some games on the Apple, I decided to give the Atari machines a go, and those did a very interesting thing when loading software, and that thing was to make sound. One beep sound per sector! Ultima II was protected using the "bad sector" method. Basically, the commercial disk was mastered in such a way that a sector, or group of them, would fail to read properly. Users could not make these disks easily, and that was the protection. I was about to start disassembling the program and decided to try something: Booting the official disk highlighted a bad read some number of reads in. You could hear it. Beep, beep, beep, bfzfzfzfzf [pause], beep, beep, beep... My solution was to just open the disk drive door at the right time. Count the beeps, open door, let errors happen close door, play game. I never did begin to disassemble that game on Atari machines. :D

NonNefarious 4y ago
Ha, I remember that. The more-clever Atari copy protection involved the publishers using a customized drive to write two consecutive sectors with the same sector number. The loading program would request that sector twice in succession, so as the drive head finished reading the first one it would immediately read the second... which had different contents. If you simply duplicated the disk, the drive would not read the sector twice and you'd be missing critical data. There was a chip you could install in your Atari drive called the Happy Enhancement to defeat this.
- mwexler 4y ago
  I added this one to my 810. Screwed it up when I did it myself (note: 1st time ever soldering should not be done on your one and only disk drive) and got the folks at Happy to fix my botched job. The chip was really interesting: it basically gave extremely low level access to the drive to copy protected disks, but it was also leverged by their "Warp" disk operating system which was both faster than the Atari system and also was able to read wonky disks that the regular drives hiccuped on.
  - NonNefarious 4y ago
    I respect the effort! I still have my 800, Trak drive, and Commodore 1702. Mint condish. The 1702 needs to be re-capped, though, for sure. Last time I tried it, the shape of the picture was wonky.
Gordonjcp 4y ago
> My solution was to just open the disk drive door at the right time. Count the beeps, open door, let errors happen close door, play game. I found a "funny" like that with an Ensoniq Mirage that had been fitted with a PC floppy drive. "Modern" PC floppy drives use a /DISKCHANGE pin that goes low when a disk is in and "chucked" on the motor spindle but the head hasn't moved off the end stop. As soon as the head moves, /DISKCHANGE goes high. "Old fashioned" Shugart drives use the same pin for /READY, which is low when there's a disk in the drive and the motor is at speed. The Mirage software checks for /READY at the start of any disk read or write, but once it's running it doesn't bother. It just keeps going until every sector is read, whether the disk is ready or not. If you pop the disk out halfway through a read, eventually it'll fail because it can't find the sector, not because the disk is no longer ready. If you use a PC floppy, it'll start to read the first time you put a disk in, but any subsequent ones will fail because the head has moved so /READY is no longer low. So what was happening was it would boot, <CLUNK TUNK TUNK TUNK TUNK TUNK TUNK TUNK TUNK TUNK TUNK> as it zeroed the head and read in ten tracks, then sit there flashing ".n.d" meaning "No Disk" when it tried to load the first sample, because it loads the OS, does some internal tasks, then loads a sample off the disk. The head has moved, the disk is no longer ready, it thinks you've got no disk in. Worse, because the software expects a bunch of things to be loaded into RAM, pressing more or less anything except "LOAD" will crash it as it reads garbage where it should read jump tables. So, for quite a while now, I let it load the OS, then in the half a second it's clearing RAM and tuning the filters, I hit the eject button and pop the disk back in. One day I'll either get the right drive, make an adaptor for the drive, or patch the OS to solve the problem ;-)
- ddingus 4y ago
  That's a good one! Operator addendum: plz eject disk and quickly insert again... I have an old laptop with some dev tools on it that also runs XP. I use it lightly and it has a bad fan. Set to entirely passive cooling? Nope. BIOS wants to see the fan spin, so... Sitting near that laptop is one of those computer air cans. At power on, wait about a second, shoot fan with air, BIOS sees spin, system check passes and just don't run the machine past passive cooling limits.
abrookewood 4y ago
Most copy programs would ignore those bad sectors and so they wouldn't be on the copies. But you could actually use a sector editor to write the bad sectors to copied disk and that was usually enough to make them work.

bruce511 4y ago

So I think you are referring to the notch on the side of the disk. If it was present the disk was writable, if not then read only. It was common to write-protect a disk using a small sticky label, folded over the notch. From memory, disks came with these labels. We also found out you could add a notch on the other side, and use the disk upside down (ie as a second disk) thus doubling the storage value of each disk. All magazine materials explained why this was a bad idea, lead to data corruption etc, but it worked well and so we ignored the warnings. This became so popular that I remember owning a punch literally made for this exact purpose. It positioned the disk in the right place and cut a perfect square notch. So this practice was wide-spread enough that someone actually designed and produced a tool to do it. But yeah, in the early days, we used scissors (very carefully).

toast0 4y ago
Any chance you still have the punch? I got a box of double sided disks that were intended for a double sided drive, so only had notches on one side... Would be lovely to notch 100 disks the easy way.
- yourapostasy 4y ago
  There are still some stores that sell these "floppy disk notchers" [1] if you're feeling really nostalgic for authentic vintage units, and occasionally they'll pop up on the usual auction sites. Or you can 3D print yourself one these days [2]. I was too poor to get a real notcher, so made do with an X-acto knife and a cardboard template I would create over and over. By the time I could afford a notcher, the muscle memory was etched into my fingers and hands, and I never bothered to get one. [1] https://retro8bitshop.com/product/floppy-disk-notcher/ https://retro8bitshop.com/product/floppy-disk-notcher/ [2] https://www.instructables.com/5-14-Floppy-Disk-Notcher/ https://www.instructables.com/5-14-Floppy-Disk-Notcher/
- bruce511 4y ago
  It might be buried in a box somewhere, but I doubt it. This was pushing 40 years ago now .... :)
- 4y ago