Re:Breaking copy protection on a 1983 game for Apple 2
by bri3d on Friday August 25, 2023 @04:09PM
(#37266428)
A set of Python scripts... more like a set of 6502 assembler routines integrated into a disk imaging app with a highly cursed build process!
4am is ridiculously prolific. The sheer number of bizarre disk-copy protection schemes applied on these old computers has always been fascinating to me. A lot of creativity went into both inventing and reversing these things.
Re:Breaking copy protection on a 1983 game for Apple 2
by stevekemp on Monday August 28, 2023 @04:58AM
(#37291488)
I think you're correct, a lot of the earliest cracks are essentially undocumented.
But in later times there was a good community of cracking software for PCs, and those notes continue to live on despite the unfortunate death of the curator/collector, +fravia.
Here's a decent mirror, for example:
https://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/mirror/fravia.org/academy.ht...
At one point I used wget --mirror to download the whole site, and that was back in the early 90s.
These lab notebooks of the cracking process are shared for titles that could not automatically be cracked.
These are the only public records of reverse engineering these titles, though many did this in the 80’s the techniques and findings were never shared beyond the cracks themselves, and 4am is so practiced and proficient I think he definitely wins the title of the best apple ii cracker in history!