One of the improvements in the (unreleased) Total Replay 5 is a massive influx of super hi-res box art. @helix_nrg and other Apple IIgs fans have been on a mission to find, scan, and retouch the original artwork for Apple II games. A lot of people have fond memories of their favorite Apple II games, but have you ever even seen the original box? But could you pick the box out of a line-up? Did you even know they came in boxes?

I spent some quality time reading the Essential Data Duplicator manual, as one does. This was the best bit copier ever written for the Apple ][. It received updates until 1993 (!) and never branched out into general disk/file utilities. It was what it was and made no apology.

1/ The manual is well-written, extremely technical, and pulls no punches. Here it accuses the author of Locksmith (another popular bit copier) of inventing and productizing a copy protection scheme, i.e. playing both sides.

2/

Fraktured Faebles

archive.org/details/Fraktu…

Passport log: archive.org/download/Frakt…

Video: archive.org/details/A2Vide…

Thanks to @A2_Canada for the disk! Funny story about this game: it basically doesn't exist. The company was pivoting away from the Apple ][ right as it was going to production. The number of copies sold rounds to zero.

Shortly after the release of Total Replay v2, @a2_qkumba and I embarked on a month-long refactoring binge, which eventually (d)evolved into the most ridiculous game of 6502 code golf you've ever seen.

1/ My first major refactor was to create the global variable gGameToLaunch and keep it updated. Previously, pressing RETURN would invoke a context-specific routine that figured out which game was showing on the screen, then launch it.

Law of the West.woz

archive.org/details/wozada…

#wozaday Lane Mastodon vs. The Blubbermen.woz

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#wozaday

Some notes on Buck Rogers:

First off, sectors on tracks are normally delimited by "sync fields" of nibbles that allow the disk controller code to get in phase with the nibbles, no matter where it starts. (It can't tell where it is within a track when it seeks to it.)

1/

https://twitter.com/a2_4am/status/1191422779956060160

"Sync" nibbles are usually eight "1" bits (0xFF) followed two "0" bits. Because reasons (read "Beneath Apple DOS"), this allows 6502 disk reading code to get back in sync quickly if it happened to start reading data in the middle of a byte, which happens most of the time.

Story time.

In 1981, @jmechner tried and failed to publish an Asteroids clone for the Apple II. It looked like this: 38 years later (so, this year), @a2_qkumba ported it to ProDOS and we included it in "Total Replay," our pack of 200+ Apple II games <archive.org/details/TotalR…>. Our version looked like this.

Mail's here "Complete in box" apparently includes Origin-branded miniature tools

So here's a flux image of a typical protected disk by Sunburst Communications. Several things of note:

1. It is fundamentally a 16-sector disk. You can see the 16 sections of each ring (track), like an unprotected disk.

However... 2. On a regular disk, and even most copy protected disks, each sector is delimited by a stream of $FF nibbles. At a very low level, these are used to synchronize the disk reading routines after moving to a different track. On Sunburst disks, those delimiters are blank...

Gather 'round, children, as I tell you the tale of Protect-O-Disk. Protect-O-Disk is ©1981 Bill Basham. Bill later got out of the copy protection business and wrote and sold a number of titles under the "Diversi" brand, including Diversi-DOS, Diversi-Copy (unprotected disks only!), Diversi-Dial, and the 16-bit Diversi-Tune.

“A Woz A Day”

Apple II .woz disk images of copy protected software, verified in multiple emulators, full metadata, downloadable or playable in your browser. Also: raw flux files, visualizations, handcrafted screenshots, links to crack write-ups, &c.

archive.org/details/wozada… Hard Hat Mack.woz

archive.org/details/wozada…

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