bchurch@oucsace.cs.OHIOU.EDU (Bob Church) (06/03/90)
I have a question for those of you who are using more than one type of computer, or who have recently moved from the // e,c to the GS. Is copy-protection more prevalent for any type of machine, or does it depend more upon the vendor? I was wandering if Apple's position against copy-protection had made a dent. It's really amazing when you look at all of the potentially nice programs that have been ruined by copy-protection. Anyone remember Quark? Another question along the same lines. There is a lot of talk of lack of compatibility between different GS rom versions. Is this due primarily to copy-protection? If so, I don't see how Apple can be blamed for the problems. ******************************************************************** * * * bob church bchurch@oucsace.cs.ohiou.edu * * * * If economics isn't an "exact" science why do computers crash * * so much more often than the stock market? * * bc * ********************************************************************
gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) (06/08/90)
In article <1419@oucsace.cs.OHIOU.EDU> bchurch@oucsace.cs.OHIOU.EDU (Bob Church) writes: >Is copy-protection more prevalent for any type of machine, or does >it depend more upon the vendor? Sort of both. The IIGS's intended usage makes it more appealing for the software publisher to not use "hard" copy protection (e.g. special disk formats), but rather to make their products GS/OS compatible and rely instead upon some form of "soft" protection (e.g. ask the user what the Mth word from page N of the manual is). The 8-bit Apple IIs could be counted on to use Apple Disk II-compatible 5.25" disks, and since much of the work of interpreting that disk format is done in software, a common form of copy protection for 8-bit Apple software involves using special data formats on the 5.25" disks, that normal DOS 3.3. or ProDOS-8 are unable to cope with. >I was wandering if Apple's position against copy-protection had made >a dent. I don't think so, although pressure from customers appears to have had some impact. One of the problems with hardware-based protection schemes is that the software product often turns out to be unusable by some customers. For example, some 3.5" disk protection schemes have made the product unusable on Apple Unidisk 3.5 drives. This is clearly bad for business. Also, IIGS owners are quite likely to want to install software on hard disk, and are upset if the copy protection scheme interferes with doing so. Even the scheme that looks for the original ("key") disk in the 3.5" drive but other than that uses the hard drive-installed copy of the software is too obnoxious to be tolerated by customers. Fortunately, there is a journal named "Computist" in which are published methods of breaking copy protection schemes for products as people figure out ways to do so. I've used that information to install numerous formerly-protected products on my hard disk. (Yes, I paid for them all. I'm not a thief.) >Another question along the same lines. There is a lot of talk of >lack of compatibility between different GS rom versions. Is this due >primarily to copy-protection? If so, I don't see how Apple can be blamed >for the problems. While the low-level trickery that some copy protection schemes rely on can run afoul of hardware or firmware changes, more usually the problem would have occurred anyway. The most common cause of such compatibility problems is the programmer relying on details of how some feature happens to operate instead of relying only on the usage that Apple specifies in their technical publications. When Apple changes the internal operation of the feature, while preserving the documented interface, programs that depended on the undocumented internals suddenly stop working. There have also been a couple of cases where the documented behavior has changed in incompatible ways, but that's not as common a problem.