>> And can anyone put this
>>great package out into the public domain or something? Or make it run on
>>my Atom harddisk? I'd love it if you could. Fiscally.
>
>If you just mean my compiler, then I don't see a problem with distributing
>it and it should work fine from the Atom.
>
>But since you probably meant the main ProTracker2 package, that's a bit
>more complicated. Not only do we have the usual Sam Coupe copyright
>problems (i.e. a copyright holder who is no longer active in the Sam market
>but has not released the copyrights) but even if we could get around that,
>there's also the problem that Persona used non-trivial copy protection,
>which someone would have to entirely decode in order to make a
>atom-compatible version.
Well, preliminary fiddling into the copy protection (MERGE "Auto": POKE
81920,a$: Load monitor) seems to show it's easy pickings to remove the
protection:
After the usual jumping down to LoMem and setting a palette, this is the code:
OUT (254),A
LD A,30
OUT (251),A
OR 96
OUT (252),A
CALL 197 ; Set values for reading Side A of disk
LD HL,32768
LD DE,3329
LD BC,24
CALL 234 ;Load Persona logo screen into page 30
LD HL,165
CALL 394 ;Fade up Persona palette
LD C,10
CALL 380 ;Wait for 10 seconds (supposedly!)
LD HL,165
CALL 457 ;Fade down Persona palette
LD A,30
OUT (251),A
XOR A
OUT (254),A
LD HL,32768
LD DE,4865
LD B,24
CALL 234 ;Load Protracker loading screen
LD HL,181
CALL 394 ;Fade in Protracker loading screen
LD A,0
OUT (251),A
LD HL,46384
LD DE,6401
LD B,35
CALL 234 ;Load side A of protracker
LD A,12
OUT (251),A
CALL 201 ;Set values for reading Side B of disk
LD HL,32768
LD DE,1
LD B,241
CALL 234 ;Load side B of Protracker
LD HL,181
CALL 457 ;Fade out loading screen
LD A,1
OUT (251),A ;Put program into HiMem
JP 41810 ;Call program!
The only protection seems to be the lack of a FAT table or something - I
don't pretend to be a genius about disks and stuff - which should be easy.
It just needs other protection if it's not going to be pirated (which may
or may not be legal now).
More when it's ready!
-tob
