Trap-A-Zoid, Apple II, ©1983 DesignWare. Unpreserved. You literally trap Zoids with trapezoids. It's adorable.pic.twitter.com/Quk4sbtxiN
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I think with such a format you can emulate the drive on a much lower level, thereby bypassing all copy protect.
It's harder than it sounds. Protection schemes exploited every edge case -- track length, cross-track alignment, drive behavior (weakbits)
But if the image format were just a high-res oversampling of the whole disk surface & the emulator emulated the drive's physical behavior...
half wondering if one could connect a modified floppy drive up to an ADC; then do an audio-like recording of all the bits (at a lower RPM).
Yes, but I'm not clear if it would be sufficient, not being an expert in how the actual copy protect schemes worked.
E.g. head positioning might not be sufficiently precise to capture enough data to emulate intentional failure modes used in copy protection.
could micro-step the head to some off-track positions and also record these?... wondering about a good MCU for this though.
would likely need an MCU with both analog input pins and enough RAM to hold useful amounts of data, which seems a little harder IME...
looking, seems probably easier to stream the bits over serial from MCU real-time than finding one w/ enough RAM for a full sampled track.
Yes, that is the idea/hope - preserve a physical disk in a digital image file which works with any copy protection code intact.
FWIW: this is why my ideas mentioned an ADC; copying data via analog could allow better emulating some behaviors (at a space cost).
though, an issue becomes RPi's/... lack of analog inputs, and a lack of affordable MCU dev boards could handle 100-200kB of samples/track.
so, probably: RPi <-> MCU <-> glue-electronics <-> modified floppy drive. MCU runs ADC then streams back to RPi for data processing/storage.
John Morris is working on a prototype of something like this called 'Applesauce' and discussed it at WOzFest PR#6:https://twitter.com/roughana/status/858178036746694656 …
yeah. also still annoyed by the seeming lack of affordable MCUs w/ more than a few kB of RAM (can't anyone do on-die DRAM?...).
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