7 Sep
2014
7 Sep
'14
12:19 p.m.
On Sun, 7 Sep 2014, Chris Osborn wrote:
I got a copy of The Newsroom by Springboard new in the
box a few weeks
ago. It's for the IBM PC and came on two 360k 5.25" floppies. The first
thing I tried to do was make copies of the disks. Unfortunately it's
protected and so I'm not exactly sure how to back them up. I tried
teledisk but the copy it made doesn't work and Newsroom keeps insisting
that I insert the original disk when I try using it on my PC.
The program wants you to use the original disk on your PC when you run it.
I read that teledisk was supposed to be able to deal
with copy
protection, but it clearly doesn't.
Who said THAT??
Yeah, there might be SOME protections that would be easy.
Teledisk can go after normal sectors. But, there were many protection
schemes that created extremely bogus formatting, and then rejected any
copy without that.
I don't have a kryoflux. What other
options are there for making backups of protected disks?
Find a copy of Copy-II
There are some schemes that that can't handle, for which there is the
Central Point Copy-II "Option Board", which is an early predecessor of
Kryoflux and/or Cat-Weasel.
There were some protection schemes that involved physical damage to the
disk! Since a roomful of workers scratching disks with paperclips
wouldn't attract investors, Vault Prolock used "laser fingerprint" (using
a laser, instead of a paperclip to scratch the disk.) They probably used
the laser BEAM, although the goal could have been just as easily
accomplished by scratching the disk with the side of the laser tube.
Forging THOSE disks called for making a paperclip scratch as close as you
can to the location of the damage on the original, and then creatively
rearranging the sectors on the track to get the scratch into the correct
sector.
Vault at one point announced "ProLock PLUS", which s'posedly would unleash
malicious actions, such as formatting, if it detected an unauthorized
copy. Public reaction was strong enough that not one single copy was ever
sold; companies that had used the previous version made public
announcements that they did NOT use the new one and changed suppliers.
By the end of the accounting period, the company ceased to exist! But the
public was unaware that it had never made it to market, and for many
years, every unexplained malfunction was attributed to rogue
copy-protection. It was a major blow to floppy protection; the next
method was CD-ROM distribution, "because it is SO difficult and expensive
for individual users to write CDs."
For a better final solution, disassemble the code, and find where it is
checking whether the disk is the original, and modify the code so that it
believes that it is the original.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com