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.
A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open
11–20 of 20 posts
Re: A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open
#12Apple 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…
Ultima games were a grind in the beginning to get enough food so you wouldn't starve. That was probably the worst part of the series as a kid.
Re: A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open
#13I 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 o…
Jason Scott has written a bit on the impending doom of 5¼" disks:
Re: A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open
#14As 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.
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.
Re: A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open
#15Apple 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…
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!
Re: A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open
#16I 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.
Re: A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open
#17I 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 o…
I transferred most of my disks in the mid-90s and even back then many of them were corrupt. (I also lived in the south FWIW)
Re: A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open
#18I 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 o…
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.
Re: A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open
#19For 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/ And some files to use it with: http://www.oric.org/ind…
This is a really cool machine! Never saw one here in the States. Too bad. Would have been a fun computer.
Re: A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open
#20As 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.
Original post writer here; there is a plan to do this.