Chris_F_Chiesa@cup.portal.com (02/25/91)
After all the recent mentions here of M.U.L.E. (probably THE BEST game ever
created for the 8-bit Atari), I went to play MY copy thereof, for the first
time in ages, only to find that it would no longer boot. I get about three
or four sectors read in (i.e. three beeps), then the system locks up. I
can only assume the disk has "gone bad" with the passage of time, although
this is one of only a handful out of hundreds I own that shows this kind of
deterioration.
Anyway, can anybody suggest a course of restoration? Anything _I_ can try
on my disk, any way to obtain a fresh copy (I assume the original authors
have long since moved on to other places and projects), anybody looking to
SELL their copy?
Tnx for any help...
Chris
Chris_F_Chiesa@cup.portal.comnorlin@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu (Norman Lin) (02/25/91)
Chris_F_Chiesa@cup.portal.com writes: >After all the recent mentions here of M.U.L.E. (probably THE BEST game ever >created for the 8-bit Atari), I went to play MY copy thereof, for the first >time in ages, only to find that it would no longer boot. I get about three >or four sectors read in (i.e. three beeps), then the system locks up. I >can only assume the disk has "gone bad" with the passage of time, although >this is one of only a handful out of hundreds I own that shows this kind of >deterioration. >Anyway, can anybody suggest a course of restoration? Anything _I_ can try >on my disk, any way to obtain a fresh copy (I assume the original authors >have long since moved on to other places and projects), anybody looking to >SELL their copy? It may be the case that your drive has slightly changed speed over the years. Archaic protection schemes sometimes involved precise disk drive alignment. Though I am not completely familiar with the principle, I hypothesize it is something like this: some diskettes, when formatted specially, can be read faster than other diskettes. The DOS III (ugh) master diskette was so formatted, and it said so in the manual -- it also said if you reformat the disk, you will lose this "fast sectoring." I would guess that a viable protection scheme would be to fast sector a disk, so that the sectors take a specific (short) amount of time to read in. The protection code in the program would time the disk read. If the disk read was slow, this would mean that the diskette was a copy since the fast sectoring could only be produced on specialized hardware. Thus, a drive out of alignment may read the diskette in slower than usual, leading the program to the incorrect conclusion that the diskette is a copy. Re-aligning the drive, perhaps, may help. This is, again, only my hypothesis, after playing around with a few Electronic Arts games. I'm sure that few people would be concerned at this point about keeping such archaic copy protection schemes secret, so can anyone shed any light on exactly how it was done? I've always wanted to know. >Tnx for any help... > Chris > Chris_F_Chiesa@cup.portal.com ---|\-#-/_|-------/|-------,*.----||---Norman Lin, University of Oklahoma---- ---|/-----|------/-|---,"--|---,"-||------norlin@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu------- --/|------------/-*'---|/------|--||-----(IP addr: 129.15.[20|22|24].2)------ -|/|\---/_|-----|-----------------||-"I gazed in your eyes, and saw the moon- --\|/-----|----*'-----------------||------------and the skies"---------------
hooverb@h.cs.wvu.wvnet.edu (Bruce Hoover) (02/26/91)
From article <1991Feb25.022602.10895@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu>, by norlin@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu (Norman Lin): > > This is, again, only my hypothesis, after playing around with a few Electronic > Arts games. I'm sure that few people would be concerned at this point about > keeping such archaic copy protection schemes secret, so can anyone shed any > light on exactly how it was done? I've always wanted to know. If I remember (from long ago) Electronic Arts disk relied on a variety of techniques for their protection. I beleive that timing was one of them, but the disks were also heavily skewed; that is, data from various sectors was originally "lined up" phyically on the disk, and the program would check for this physical allignment. Therefore, and normal copy program would transfer data but make no effort to maintain the physical allignment. I installed a board in my 1050 called a 1050 Duplicator (or some such) that cost about $150. It claimed that it would copy all EOA disks without additional hardware or software modification. Three years later and two hardware upgrades and four software versions later (all at eatra cost) they finally announced that the new program would simply patch Electronic Arts games. Strange to say, after three years of rhetoric about the evils of copy protection, this patch program was, you guessed it, copy protected, and the hardware-modified drive would not copy it! Give me a break... Bruce Hoover>