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The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

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Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#2

Post by h2odragon »

I never did BBC Micro, but in the early PC days there were "Copy II PC" add in ISA cards that the floppy cable passed through on the way to the drive. With their software most any floppy disk could be copied with a standard PC drive; and with a bit of hacking you could do things like read Victor 9000 floppies.

There was only one floppy I could never get, a licensed Scrabble game that insisted on writing scores to its game disc. My mom loved that game and we had to buy it twice. It was humiliating, I had this special hardware and I never did figure that one out.

* found one: https://www.biocomp.net/o62799.htm

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#4

Post by ev1 »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #3

Fully online, streaming gaming a la Stadia, will be the ultimate in copy and cheat protection. Since you don't have access the the actual code, you won't be able to modify or hack it to either cheat or bypass protection.

I understand that this is horrible for unbreakable DRM, but in my case, I only play multiplayer online games (MMOs) - there is nothing to pirate. I'd happily take game streaming in exchange for getting rid of invasive, useless, data-collecting (including clipboard contents, uploading files on disk, etc.) rootkit anticheats starting at boot being "mandatory" to play.

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#5

Post by carapace »

Who recalls the provenance of this old legend about the fellow who challenged his pal to decode a certain floppy?

It was a bog-standard DOS boot disk (IIRC) that he could put in his machine and boot normally. But his pal put it in his computer and... nothing doing, no boot. Analysis of the floppy availed not. The challenge went unmet.

What did our hero do to make the floppy?

.esrever ni nups evird eht os ytiralop etisoppo htiw meht dehcattaer dna ,rotom eldnips evird eht ot seriw rewop eht deredlosed ,evird ksid eht denepo eH

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#6

Post by ballenf »

I don't think it was mentioned, but I wonder if the mains power fluctuation (voltage or hz) would affect drive sector length / rpm also? So even the same drive couldn't produce a high fidelity copy of one of these discs if the power input was different.

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#8

Post by Firehawke »

h2odragon wrote: post #2

I never did BBC Micro, but in the early PC days there were "Copy II PC" add in ISA cards that the floppy cable passed through on the way to the drive. With their software most any floppy disk could be copied with a standard PC drive; and with a bit of hacking you could do things like read Victor 9000 floppies. There was only one floppy I could never get, a licensed Scrabble game that insisted on writing scores to its…

The "Copy II PC Option Board", yeah. I knew a guy who had one, and it definitely could handle a lot of stuff that you normally couldn't. Interestingly, you really wanted an early-era board because they were forced to water down the later revisions so they couldn't copy newer protection schemes.

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#10

Post by anakaine »

carapace wrote: post #5

Who recalls the provenance of this old legend about the fellow who challenged his pal to decode a certain floppy? It was a bog-standard DOS boot disk (IIRC) that he could put in his machine and boot normally. But his pal put it in his computer and... nothing doing, no boot. Analysis of the floppy availed not. The challenge went unmet. What did our hero do to make the floppy? .esrever ni nups evird eht os ytiralop eti…

Tricky
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