jimomura@lsuc.on.ca (Jim Omura) (11/09/90)
First, I should again say thanks for all the help I received
regarding the Line-A stuff. That work is going along smoothly
for now.
Aside from that, today I bougth Lombard Rally from Mandarin
Software and as a driving simulation it's about as good as late
ST (pre-STE) software gets. I'm hoping we'll see some better
stuff now that we have true proportional joystick capabilities
on the STE. But the real question I have has to do with copy
protection. I read through the manual and the box and there's
no mention of either copy protection or lack thereof. So the
first thing I tried was to back up the disks and run off backups.
I found the following:
NOTE: I'm running a 1040ST with Rainbow TOS 1.4
1. I formatted a fresh double sided disk and copied all the files
from Disk 1 onto it. Then I followed this with all the files
from the Data Disk. It booted in part, but the openning music
was mainly noise. It seems that the sound is being picked off
from the wrong places. Essentially, it didn't seem to work.
2. I then reformatted the same disk as a single sided disk and
copied the files from Disk 1 onto it. This worked a bit
better. The sound was still messed up, but it seemed to
run without problems, as long as I used the original data
disk.
3. I tried to backup the Data disk onto the new single sided
disk, but this didn't work. The backup routine would not
finish reading the whole of the data disk. This is curious
because there wasn't any problem reading the files the first
time I did the file-by-file copy to the double sided disk.
My conclusions are as follows:
It does NOT seem that the game was meant to be generally
copy protected. I expect that what they have done is to put
the music on the "unused" side of a single sided formatted
disk. This would explain why the game seems to play from my
backup of the Start disk, but has messed up music (from the
first time I formatted the disk and copied it onto the "working"
copy disk).
Most likely, the final tracks of the "Data" disk aren't
even formatted. This is a normal expedient used by game companies.
Does anybody know whether this is correct?
Cheers! -- Jim O.
--
Jim Omura, 2A King George's Drive, Toronto, (416) 652-3880
lsuc!jimomura
Byte Information eXchange: jimomura