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C64 Preservation Project - 6/15/05 [message #139394] Wed, 15 June 2005 22:46
rcade is currently offline  rcade
Messages: 55
Registered: February 2005
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Member
Hello everyone,

Things are still moving fast on the disk archiving front. I owe a very
special thanks to a lot of people, but most recently a gentleman from
Germany who calls himself "Quader". He has sent in an unprecedented
amount of disks and continues to amass them, so Gamebase will be very
busy for the new V4.

Speaking of which, congratulations to the team for V3 which contains
more C64 gaming than you could ever do in your lifetime, for sure.

I have delved into archiving the dreaded "Rainbow Arts" protection and
it's quite a bugger. Some info on the site, but if you have any
experience copying or cracking these or have ever tried to disassemble
the loader, please contact me.

Here is what I have so far, from the site:

------
There are two versions that I have found in the wild on this one. It is
used on Rainbow Arts, Magic Bytes, and Time Warp disks (all PAL releases).

The first version is used on disks released in 1987-1988. It contains a
signature on track 36. During the load, it bumps back and forth between
t18 and t36 and formats the disk and resets if the key isn't found
(unless the disk is write-protected of course). Remasters and emulators
both will run these disks about 1/10 times for some reason not yet known.

The second version is used on disks from 1989-1991. It has a strangely
constructed track 18 and bumps between t18-t19 to check protection if
you can manage to get a good image of the directory sectors at all.
Every sector on track 18 is corrupted in some very subtle way to make
them very hard to image or copy, but read almost every time on the real
disk. My guess is that it has very small bad GCR runs that trip up our
ability to read this with the routine mnib/burstnibbler uses, which is
waiting for the byte ready line and dumping to parallel port. Some sort
of alternate method of watching the bits directly would have to be done
which I believe would be unprecedented in disk copying. Either that or
write some Catweasel software!

Anyway, give us a visit. I'm getting close to 1,000 different original
titles archived.

Pete Rittwage
C64 Preservation Project
http://rittwage.com/c64pp
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