commodore 64/128 question

Doug Coward wrote: They sure did. I saw lots of strange and wonderful things. The GEOS 1.x series used self modifying code on startup to steer you away from figuring out what the code did. Some programs used sync traps which were tracks that had all 1's on them. If you tried to use a copy program, the 1541 or 1571 would seek forever on these tracks. Others used extra sectors, that is two copies of the same sector # on the same track, or missing sectors, or extra tracks past the end of the drive, or even half tracks by half stepping the drive head. All sorts of weird formatting schemes like this were used. The really lame ones just looked for an error. For example, Spy Hunter would do this right after loading itself, by seeking to a track and reading from it. If it got real data it would spit out a message about pirates. But if you opened the drive door at the right moment, you could play the game. :-) There were all sort of weird and wonderful protection schemes, and also there were plenty of copier programs to break or bypass them. It was quite an evolutionary's cesspool. The protection guys would invent something new as soon as their old scheme was broken, so the guys breaking them would get even more creative at building copiers. In the end, I think, the crackers won. I think at one point there was one copier program that would load code into two 1541's and then you could unplug your C64 or C128 from the drives. Then, when you stuck a source disk in drive 8, and a blank in drive 9, it would copy them very quickly over the serial port at high speeds. It's really amazing that the C128 worked as well as it did. It was silly to include CP/M when the PC's were the hot stuff of the day, and certainly, the C64 mode didn't help the C128 mode much. Why write C128 code when you can write for the C64 and it'll run on both. Of course, the C128 was much better at one thing. Since it had the 80 column mode, it was better suited for word processing and also running terminal programs. So there were plenty of those. But not too much for the native C128 mode.