
A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open - Mithrandir
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4630
======
weinzierl
This is about a collection of about 300 Apple II games playable in the the
browser, but the best part comes at the end of the article:

    
    
        4am meticulously and [sic] carefully walks through 
        the entire process of cracking each program. The 
        code, the tracing of boot flow, the missteps, and 
        even the internal thought processes that lead to the    
        solved mystery. 
        They’re magical. And every 4AM item has one.

------
MCRed
I cut my teeth programming this machine and learning the ins and outs of how
it worked. We were much closer to the hardware in those days-- you could have
things like disks that wouldn't work on some machines because the variance of
the resistor in the disk drive caused a slight incompatibility when you tried
to read data from a nonexistent track that only exists in the custom made
disks the program originally came on but that doesn't exist in the operating
system (which formats the disk you put the program on when you copy)... and
which most disks with custom assembly code can read, but your particular drive
cannot.

In 2008 I spent 6 months going thru my Apple II collection, many of the disks
had spent years in a garage in Louisiana and Texas. Surprisingly most were
still readable, but I lost some terrible poetry and equally terrible letters
to my high school sweetheart (turns out she wasn't so sweet as an adult.)

IF you have Apple // disks, or any kind of old format, I urge you to recover
it NOW. Time is not on your side.

I had a DEC Tape from the 1980s that eventually I think I just threw away
because I couldn't find anyone on the internet who could read the data.

~~~
StillBored
I have literally a thousand or so floppies (apple II, PC, some CPM). The vast
majority weren't legitimate. A few years ago I went through and retrieved some
of the ones with my own personal work on them. But the vast majority sit
around waiting for the oxide to fall off.

I was actually thinking the other day it might be amusing to upload the text
editor I wrote in applesoft basic to github.

I was lucky I guess, most of the ones I recovered worked, but the recovery
process (IIGS, via appletalk to 68k mac, to pc via ethernet) is such a PITA, I
quit after the first 5 or 6...

I figured that most of the games and apps were available in some of the
abandonware collections that my pirated copies weren't really worth
recovering.

------
DiabloD3
Apple IIs were part of my childhood, yet I never owned one.

In school, we had copies of Oregon Trail. Class time when we had spare time
would often devolve into our own little version of "Twitch plays Oregon
Trail", with one guy at the keyboard, and everyone trying to help make the
decisions, usually ending up HEY LETS BUY LOTS OF AMMO and we spend 15 minutes
collecting 22 metric shitloads of game and only being able to carry a tiny
fraction back.... or fording the river and drowning. Every. Goddamned. Time.

Best part? The end game where you raft down the river on the final stretch,
and its just everyone cheering on whoever hasn't managed to crash the raft
yet. You could tell who actually had a video game console at home, whoever
manned the controls and survived knew the horrors of Megaman and Castlevania;
those who didn't, well, lived much simpler, less action packed, lives.

Fuck, when did games turn into a chore and stop being fun?

~~~
the_af
If you want to re-live good old Oregon Trail, I recommend the zombie-themed
retro remake "Organ Trail". It's tons of fun... and I didn't even play the
original!

------
fit2rule
For those of you experiencing a lot of nostalgia for your old faithful Apple
II machine, may I recommend checking out some of the other wonderful 8-bit
machines of that era, too? If you've got the druthers, you can get a really
nice taste for my favourite 8-bit machine from that era, the Oric-1/Atmos.

You'll need an emulator:

[https://code.google.com/p/oriculator/](https://code.google.com/p/oriculator/)

And some files to use it with:

[http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=top150game...](http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=top150gamesoverall)

Take the first 10 or 20 entries from that list and have a lot of fun!

And remember: Old machines never die - their owners do!

~~~
ddingus
This is a really cool machine! Never saw one here in the States. Too bad.
Would have been a fun computer.

------
empressplay
This is a great addition to the archive of publicly available Apple II
software! If you like playing around with old Apple II programs, our Applesoft
BASIC interpreter DiscoRunner comes with close to a thousand games and apps to
play around with. Check it out at
[http://discorunner.com](http://discorunner.com)

------
NelsonMinar
I love how the text descriptions of the cracks are formatted to 40 columns.
That's some serious Apple ][ fidelity. I'm grateful they used mixed case
though.

------
harkyns_castle
I also cut my teeth programming on the old Apple IIe. Brings back some fond
memories... bought a big tome at one stage that had an assembler you could
'install' by typing out pages and pages of machine code... I devoutly typed
out all umpteen pages but I never got that assembler to work, even with
checksum bytes at the end of every line. Back then programming felt like
working magic to me. Ty Woz.

------
Shivetya
I remember the days of hacking Wizardry 1 and 2 on the Apple... for awhile we
had an arcade in an upper scale mall named The Galleria called 2001 which used
to let you rent time on Apple 2 computers.

------
white-flame
As somebody researching automated reverse engineering, I would love for these
to alongside the uncracked originals. While the text files document what it
was doing, the ori isn't there to replicate the process.

There are file formats which record the raw head flux from spinning across the
drives, which should archive any goofy drive-munging scheme employed.

~~~
sehugg
That might work for most but not all schemes; spiral encoding encodes data
_while_ the stepper motor is moving, so you'd need some very fine-resolution
imaging and some very accurate hardware simulation to make everything work
properly.

------
ddingus
Under download options, there is "TEXT" and these are commentaries about each
crack. Great to read.

A small group of us successfully cracked a program or two, using just the
monitor and some utilities we wrote. It was a challenge and an education all
in one! Highly recommend reading through a few of these.

