3 ms·
4am has cracked loads of apple ii games, and after doing several hundred manually, automated it as a set of python scripts, https://github.com/a2-4am/passport h
by jquast 3y ago
4am has cracked loads of apple ii games, and after doing several hundred manually, automated it as a set of python scripts, https://github.com/a2-4am/passport https://github.com/a2-4am/passport an article with interview here, https://paleotronic.com/2018/06/15/confessions-of-a-disk-cracker-the-secrets-of-4am/ https://paleotronic.com/2018/06/15/confessions-of-a-disk-cra...
These lab notebooks of the cracking process are shared for titles that could not automatically be cracked.
These are the only public records of reverse engineering these titles, though many did this in the 80’s the techniques and findings were never shared beyond the cracks themselves, and 4am is so practiced and proficient I think he definitely wins the title of the best apple ii cracker in history!
- bri3d 3y agoA set of Python scripts... more like a set of 6502 assembler routines integrated into a disk imaging app with a highly cursed build process! 4am is ridiculously prolific. The sheer number of bizarre disk-copy protection schemes applied on these old computers has always been fascinating to me. A lot of creativity went into both inventing and reversing these things.
- stevekemp 3y agoI think you're correct, a lot of the earliest cracks are essentially undocumented. But in later times there was a good community of cracking software for PCs, and those notes continue to live on despite the unfortunate death of the curator/collector, +fravia. Here's a decent mirror, for example: https://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/mirror/fravia.org/academy.htm https://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/mirror/fravia.org/academy.ht... At one point I used wget --mirror to download the whole site, and that was back in the early 90s.