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see https://archive.org/details/apple_ii_library_4am A collection of historical software for Apple II computers from the 1980s and early 1990s. Each item was originally copy protected (i.e. the original floppy disk could not be copied to another floppy disk), but the copy protection has been removed and documented. Most items also include a "work disk" comprising the intermediate files created during the deprotection.

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1 comments

Fascinating.

Do you know how they do it? I mean, in order to crack these games, they need to have the original physical floppy, don't they? Or do they have a digital version of the protected floppy with all its weird sectoring and data on it?.

Well you'd have to start with an original floppy or cassette, wouldn't you? Some still enjoy cracking on the real hardware, but most make a low level floppy or tape image and work from that.

I've only cracked relatively simple stuff, but working in an emulator is a LOT easier than working on real hardware. In an emulator you can freeze the system and inspect both the computer and the disk drive, set breakpoints, modify memory, and so on, and it's totally undetectable to the protection code.