RetroGaming

I hope there are enough independent people saving at least some of our gaming history, because it’s a shame to see it evaporate like this.

I have a buddy who had fond memories of an old Apple ][ game, but he couldn't find it anywhere. No copy of the software existed anywhere he could find, for sale or otherwise.

After a literal decade of searching, he finally found a copy of the game disk on eBay! He picked up a 5.25" floppy USB drive, hooked up an Apple ][ emulator... And nothing. The disk was encrypted in some way that made it unreadable.

Not one to give up easily, he then found and purchased an Apple ][ with a working drive.

The disk worked!

He started researching old copy protection schemes and it turned out that the disk had information written between the standard tracks to make it unreadable by standard hardware, but accessible to the software on the disk when it manually tweaked the drive head's position.

One USB driver patch (and a couple months) later, he was able to extract the original software from the disk for archival. It works in emulators and is finally archived.