On floppy disk protection

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A nice new technical post from Chris ‘scarybeasts’ about the arms race of floppy disk copy protection schemes, mostly from an Acorn perspective:

Many good links within.

‘scruss’ on Stardot adds:

Weak Bits were a really big thing on the Apple II, going back to 1982 or before. It’s worth checking some of the 4am crack logs (like this one: The Kingdom of Facts) for the details. It seems that Datasoft did it with a modified C64 drive attached to an Apple II.

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Way-back-when, In the days where copying was just a thing, I had a piece of hardware that could replicate most of the protection schemes. It was 8 bit and amazing :smiley: The Copy-2-PC Option board

ob-box-1

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I’ve just rediscovered a trove of textual notes collected by Jason Scott which covers PC, Apple, and Commodore (at least).

See also the earlier thread by @elb:
Low-level Explorations of Commodore’s Soft-sectored Floppies