C-Lab invested at least as much effort into the copy protection system (which involved a cartridge-port dongle) as into Creator and Notator themselves. Gerhard wanted to be paid for his extraordinary effort.
Last I knew, the copy protection stands unbroken, even though some people had gotten partial emulation of the dongle working.
I broke the copy protection using GPT 5.6 a couple months ago. I have a forked version of Hatari that can boot and run Notator and Creator by emulating the dongle. If there's interest I can make it available. I just got lazy about cleaning everything up into something others could use.
I pondered moving on and having it patch Notator itself to remove the copy protection once and for all. The other cracks that were out there for it never worked.
Last I knew, the copy protection stands unbroken, even though some people had gotten partial emulation of the dongle working.
i'm sure claude will figure it out soon