On Tue, 8 Jun 2004, Dave Dunfield wrote:
> I have a friend who has recently retired an Apple IIe in favor of
> running a simulator. He was able to use ADT and a serial card to
> transfer most of his disk images over to the PC for use with the
> simulation, however certain copy-protected games could not be
> transferred.
>
> Does anyone know if there is software available to transfer Apple II
> disk images on a raw-binary basis (ie: not necessarily well formed
> sectors), and if so, are there any simulators which can make use of
> such images?
I don't know of any. It would be a cool feature, and not too difficult to
implement. A cracker named Saltine made a very nice binary disk image
program back in the day called SST (Saltine's Super Transfer...or
something like that) which takes a binary image of a disk and makes a
file of it that can then be compressed and transfered over modem lines
(or in today's case the Internet).
> I know this would be fairly complex, as the Apple could do half
> tracks etc., and timing can be critical to many Apple copy protection
> schemes. These factors would also have to be delt with somehow - is
> there anything available which can do this?
I'm not sure if SST did half- or quarter-tracks, but I'd bet that it did
have options to check for those. The timing critical technique was called
synchronization, whereby the alignment of sectors from one track to
another was checked (a very simplistic description). When I ever get
some free time again I'll take a look at the program and refresh myself
with what its capabilities are.
The next step would then be to write a disk drive emulator that can
emulate the hardware of the Apple Disk ][ controller so that it can
properly boot such disks.
The other option is to find someone who can crack the software in question
so that it can be put onto unprotected disks and then transferred to the
PC to run under the emulator.
I can make my services available to do that for a reasonable fee :)
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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Received on Wed Jun 09 2004 - 18:17:12 BST