Audio Cassette formats; Copy protection?

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Mon Nov 30 09:40:18 1998

At 09:02 PM 11/25/98 -0800, Marvin wrote:
>Someone mentioned that there are copy protection schemes for cassette tape,
>and I was curious what these might be and how they might interfere with
>recording the tape onto my HD.

It's hard to imagine a scheme that couldn't be broken using a simple
deck-to-deck "bit copy" of the audio, or the equivalent of what we're
discussed with digitizing. I *can* imagine schemes to prevent
the simple load-save copy via the computer. If the cassette loader format
included a "load at given address" function, you could make a tape that
replaced a RAM-based vector to the loading routine itself. Similarly,
if the tape loading process included a "jump to address after loading",
the tape could include a short loader in the standard format, then
continue loading data in a different format, rinse-lather-repeat.

- John
Received on Mon Nov 30 1998 - 09:40:18 GMT