
Applesauce – Make exact images of copy-protected Apple II floppy disks - timmytokyo
https://wiki.reactivemicro.com/Applesauce
======
timmytokyo
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMrOiYCEuxc)

~~~
sp332
And don't just assume that software has been archived because it's a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.

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derefr
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](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.

~~~
sp332
4am seems very excited about the project.
[https://twitter.com/a2_4am/status/993247470414127104](https://twitter.com/a2_4am/status/993247470414127104)

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

------
acomjean
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_nibbler#Apple_II_-_Locksmith)

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.

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

------
cat199
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..

~~~
timmytokyo
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
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.

~~~
StillBored
IIRC, they were all defeated, except for the burn a hole in the disk and try
to write to it copy protection mechanism.

It was more a matter of which bit copy software had the right profile to be
able to copy the tracks.

Back when I was doing a lot of copying disks, I remember it was really
important to get the drive speeds right for a given profile. That way the you
could dead reconing style copy for a partial track once the drive sync'ed to
some known pattern that was fully on the starting track. These copies
obviously didn't work 100% of the time, but generally a few tries would yield
a working copy.

I personally used Copy][ Plus as my primary utility and vaguely remember
writing little "scripts" (more a few bytes of hex codes IIRC that described
which tracks to read, and how to do quarter stepping/etc) to describe how to
copy spiral track disks. Although frequently, I remember it being easier to
try one of a number of other bit copy utilities first.

~~~
colanderman
> the burn a hole in the disk and try to write to it copy protection mechanism

Uhh, mind elaborating on this?

~~~
_russross
I remember this was a protection scheme, but I don't remember who used it.
They would use a laser to burn a small hole in the disk. At load time, the
program would attempt to write to the sector with the hole and then read it
back. If it succeeded, they knew it was a copy.

Basically, they created a disk that could accept writes everywhere except a
certain sector, something you could not replicate with even a perfect copy.

~~~
buserror
Yes and that was VERY easily defeated too -- you just had to take the floppy,
very carefully align the synchronization hole with your copy, and take a
pinhead and make your own little scratch in the same place.

It was a bit silly to be honest -- this was the easiest copy protection to
bypass!

~~~
hota_mazi
That won't work, because the actual disk inside the sleeve will never be
aligned the same way your copy is.

The protection is not the hole in the sleeve, it's the hole in the disk. For
example, the garbage reads would happen on track 12, $230 bytes after the $D5
$AA $96 marker. Good luck physically reproducing this.

These protections are trivial to remove in code, though.

~~~
buserror
You clearly have never looked at a floppy before making "that won't work"
comments, but floppies have a sync hole that _is_ aligned.

And having made multiple copies like that, I know very well it worked pretty
well as a method -- it's very likely why that method never became the
'uncopiable' it was claimed to be when it came out.

~~~
StillBored
The apple ][ didn't have the hardware to read the sync hole (much less a
sensor to detect where the head was, hence the clatter on reset as the head
bangs into the endstop). That was part of the magic, each sector had a sync
field and then a few bytes and a track/sector number.

That is of course why its not just a simple case of locating where the burned
hole was relative to the sync hole because the "physical" location of a sector
offset on the disk would normally vary from disk to disk (or for that matter
from track to track) or format to reformat.

------
WillPostForFood
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
Let's chat.

~~~
lathiat
Please do :-)

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

------
geocar
> 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
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...](http://www.a2heaven.com/webshop/index.php?rt=product/product&product_id=129)

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

changed my life

