Applesauce – Make exact images of copy-protected Apple II floppy disks

https://wiki.reactivemicro.com/Applesauce

by timmytokyo • 8 years ago

109 35 8 years ago

wiki.reactivemicro.com

timmytokyo2• 8 years ago

Applesauce will be an amazing boon to the preservation of Apple II software. If you have any original Apple II software that you would like to preserve publically for posterity, please consider contacting Jason Scott from the Internet Archive (twitter handle: @textfiles).

The reactivemicro wiki page seems to be buckling under the load. To learn more about applesauce, watch this video from KansasFest 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMrOiYCEuxc

sp3323• 8 years ago

And don't just assume that software has been archived because it's a commercial release of some kind. New software gets discovered all the time from personal collections.

cat199• 8 years ago

was always mesmerized by the copy protection on some of these disks.. which begs the chicken-and-egg question of how these disks were written in the first place, since it sounds like these copy protection schemes are above the threshold of what is 'addressable' by the system..

timmytokyo2• 8 years ago

The devices used to fabricate the floppy disks were not the same as the devices used by consumers. They had many more capabilities, infamously including the ability to adjust the write head to follow a spiral pattern (instead of concentric circular tracks).

joezydeco• 8 years ago

Spiral writing didn't mean a thing unless the consumer's drive could read it back.

The more important part about spiral writing was that it defeated the track-by-track copy of most Apple ][ copy programs, since there was no disk position synchronization available on the consumer drives. Note that the Applesauce device modifies the drive to allow for this.

kazinator2• 8 years ago

The Apple II drives have this capability, which is why they can follow the data. The track-to-track motion is carried out by a stepper motor which is controlled with some memory mapped registers. To move from one track to another, the motor is stepped through four phases corresponding to "quarter track" increments. Some copy-protected software was written on using partial tracks, with quarter track increments. The software's loading routines knew how to follow that.

hota_mazi3• 8 years ago

The most popular and most devious ways to protect floppies on the Apple ][ were more or less all based on timing bits (including the most famous protection of all, the E7 slipstream).

These timing bits were necessary on the disks for the reading head to be able to tell 1's from 0's, but copiers did not have the ability to maintain them, so copies were often desynchronized.

AppleSauce is the only device that can successfully preserve timing bits, hence allowing protected disks to be copied.

Source: I crack Apple ][ programs for fun.

sp3323• 8 years ago

Here's one where Track 6 is a bit-for-bit copy of Track 5 - including the header that says "This is Track 5"! https://archive.org/download/PinballConstructionSet4amCrack/...

diskblitz3• 8 years ago

They are actually just writing data to the concentric tracks, but just timing the steps between the tracks very carefully. When making a copy, you couldn't get the steps to sync up and so the timing for the steps would all be broken.

High end commercial copiers really didn't come into play until 1984-5.

webreac• 8 years ago

At the end of life of Oric, a friend has published a game. The editor has asked him to add a copy protection on the disk. A little latter, the editor asked him to provide a copy program because the copy protection was defeating his physical disk copier ;-)

acomjean• 8 years ago

As a young one, I had a apple //e copy disk with a wide variety of copy programs (copied of course...)

My favorite could copy 2 disks only 4 disk swaps (If you had a single drive). And "Locksmith" which had profiles for certain originals that would allow copying by knowing the original's secret. It was a back and forth battle between the copy programs and copy protection..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_nibbler#Apple_II_-_Locksmi...

Of course we got a bought copy of electronic arts "seven cities of gold" and it didn't work because of the copy protection. Got a second copy and it too didn't work...

My friend had a card that could at a push of a button dump the entire apple ][+ Ram to a bootable disk (64K!). Great for those single load games.

derefr• 8 years ago

Kind of an ironic end to @a2_4am’s project to reverse engineer the copy protections on all this software (https://archive.org/details/apple_ii_library_4am). Rather than his DRM-free versions, Archive.org will probably prefer to use these .WOZ flux-track files that keep the copy-protection intact.

Still, I suppose 4am’s work exposed quite a bit of the history of copy protection, even if we won’t be using his rips. The docs he wrote outlining his process of cracking the DRM (and his gradual automation of such) are valuable historical artifacts all by themselves, and I hope they persist in the Archive even alongside the .WOZ rips.

sp3323• 8 years ago

4am seems very excited about the project. https://twitter.com/a2_4am/status/993247470414127104

And there will still be work to do. https://twitter.com/yesterbits/status/993345477805559809

The Internet Archive will have both copies around, and I can't think of any particular reason they wouldn't let you boot both of them in their emulator.

diskblitz3• 8 years ago

I don't really think that this is the end of cracking. It is more of just the start of a new era of preservation. There is still a good amount of hardware out there like the CFFA3000 that doesn't support .WOZ images. Those will still require the cracked DSK files.

amelius• 8 years ago

Makes me wonder at what point it will become impossible to root an iPhone.

WillPostForFood• 8 years ago

This is great, I just packed a box of ~200 old Apple ][ 5.25" floppies, and was wondering if there was ever going to be a way to see what was on them again.

textfiles• 8 years ago

Let's chat.

lathiat• 8 years ago

Please do :-)

empressplay• 8 years ago

We recently implemented read and write .woz support into our Apple IIe emulator: https://paleotronic.com/2018/06/05/microm8-now-supports-woz/

We changed our internal reference format from NIB to WOZ so we convert other formats to WOZ upon loading... we <3 WOZ!

geocar• 8 years ago

All flux transitions read for the disk are saved in this file. The size of a file is about 20Megs.

Incredible!

"360kb" capacity, with 20Megs of information.

_divj• 8 years ago

shout out to the diskjockey if he's still out there somewhere for making this: http://www.a2heaven.com/webshop/index.php?rt=product/product...

i learned computers (6502 assembly) by reverse engineering and cracking copy protection on games.

changed my life

Applesauce – Make exact images of copy-protected Apple II floppy disks

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