Simon Owen wrote: > It's actually Chris Pile's original Defender disk, which does some > gap-level checking as part of the copy protection. The gap > information isn't stored as part of the disk image, as it's almost > never needed, and would more than double the image size. SimCoupe > actually fakes the raw track data from information it knows about the > sectors on the current track, so it looks pretty authentic in > programs like SAM DICE.
One of the ways I was going to do protection (if I'd ever got round to it) was buying a load of really crappy disks and writing code specific for each disk that attempted to format a track I knew would fail - if it formatted correctly it would know the disk had been copied... not usable on high-volume items, but for the low-volume Sam market, it would have been perfectly do-able :) I do remember reading about one company which used to laser holes in their disks at a specific point to do much the same thing, although I don't think this was on the Sam. On a side track (hah), has anyone else found that all their old Sam disks are completely unreadable? Is it likely that I had a drive that, while being in-spec of the other Sam drives, is out of spec enough so that the average PC drive can't read floppies created by it? Or is it more likely that almost every single one of my disks have simply degraded over time? I spent many many hours trying to get Linux to read my Sam floppies using different FDD parameters before giving up and deciding that it must simply be the disks :( G ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________
