Dave Lee ha escrito: > Hello, I recently got about 100+ floppies of 128k and 512k software I would like to > save and preserve somehow. Most disks contain copy-protected programs, they > themselves are copies someone made from original disks. > > I am using "Copy II Mac 7.2" to copy them on to my SE/30 so I can eventually get > them over to the G4 and burn them on to a CD. [...] > > So how worth it is saving this software? I am concerned that it may be impossible > to get them back on a disk to use with the Mac from an archive. Anyone know about > this stuff?
I think every old program is worth preserving. Perhaps in the future you or someone else will be searching for some old program, and if you have wasted it, you'll find yourself saying "why didn't I save those old disks?" That's my point of view. About the copy protection, well, I'm not an expert on how Mac diskette hardware works, but I know it isn't very different to Apple ]['s, whose hardware I know pretty well. In the Apple ][, if you can make a copy without geting an error during the process, it will probably work. There are also special disk image formats designed to contain copy-protected disks (the so called "nibblized" disk images). These allow you even running copy-protected software in the emulators. What I don't know is if copy-protected Mac diskettes use the same tricks as in the Apple ][. If they do (and I bet for it), they can be safely copied or stored as images. This is only theory. The only way to know is to try: make a disk image with the SE/30, take a blank DD diskette, try to write the image into it, and see if it launchs in the 128k. I think you should also take into account another thing. Starting from the Mac IIfx (I believe), almost all Macintoshes doesn't use the main CPU for diskette I/O, but use a custom processor in order to improve speed and free the main CPU. This means that if a copy protection schema relies in direct hardware access (as they do mostly in the Apple ][), not only you won't be able to run the program in those computers, but you also won't be able to copy the diskette or create/restore images of it. Oh, and by the way, here is one question for anyone that wants to answer it: to use a SuperDrive in a Mac that only has 800k disk drives, what do you have to do? ROM update, hardware patch...? It would be fine if you put in the web some of the images you make :-) . Greetings and good luck, Antonio Rodr�guez (Grijan) -- Compact Macs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/>. Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Compact Macs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/compact.shtml> The FAQ: <http://macfaq.org/> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive:<http://www.mail-archive.com/compact.macs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
