Apple Kracker’s Guide

Back in the days of the Apple II, there was a thriving scene in trading copies of commercial software. Means to prevent this, through copy protection schemes, were just as rampant, as publishers sought to protect their work from those who would use it without paying. The process of figuring out a disk’s copy protection and making it so it could be copied and run by others was called cracking, or sometimes, kracking.

Cracking was, and still is, a black art. There are many ways to protect a disk from being copied, and just as many to deprotect that data. Some disks remain uncracked to this day. It is the work of Apple II cracker 4am (Mastodon) to try to unlock the data on these rapidly aging pieces of media so they can be preserved. (On 4am, jump to the bottom.)

The Apple II Kracker’s Guide seems to have been written by a anonymous user known as The Disk Jockey. It’s a good overview of basic forms of copy protection and ways to defeat them. A copy is at the Internet Archive, but I encountered it in the collection at bitsavers.org, here. It’s like candy to someone of the right frame of mind. Like me!

Aside: If the name 4am sounds familiar, and you find yourself thinking “Didn’t he used to be on Twitter?” He was. He’s not anymore. This happened several months before the Age of Musk. Twitter’s automated processes decided somehow that a video he tweeted of Apple II software Super Print booting was revenge porn and banned him, even rejecting an appeal. He moved to Mastodon. Now that Twitter is missing half of its employees, situations like this will probably become more common. 4am is not the subject of this post, but if you want to read more about Apple II protection and its breaking, you should follow him on Mastodon. He has about one tenth of the followers there that he had on Twitter, which is a shame.

Myst Demake for Apple II

How much of Myst can you fit onto an Apple II with three 5 1/4” floppy disks? As it turns out, if you don’t really care about screen resolution, nearly all of it.

Images from the demake’s website, lined above.

In the following Youtube video, you can watch a playthrough of the first fifth of the game. A complete run is in the playlist linked here. Warning: prepare your ears for mayhem.

Apple II Myst Demake

Forgeries in PC Retro Gaming Collecting

Image credit: Ars Technica

Kyle Orland at Ars Technica, who always does good work, has a long piece up about scandals in PC game collecting. It’s a close-knit subculture where members trust each other implicitly, but as the value of old games has gone up, it has recently been awash in forgeries.

A prime culprit in their distribution was Enrico Ricciardi, a prominent figure in the community who many members trusted. He is known for writing books on the history of the Ultima games and the early days of Ultima publisher Origin Systems. It’s not known that he was actually forging the copies of the games, but the fakes are known to have passed through his hands, and it’s considered by the group that he should have been able to spot fakes.

It’s a fascinating article that involves prominent Apple II disk imaging expert 4am doing forensics on a supposedly-legitimate disk of The Chambers of Xenobia and finding it was a cracked copy.

Ars Technica: Inside the $100K+ forgery scandal that’s roiling PC game collecting

Lemmings on the Apple II

Via 8bitnews.io, Vince Weaver has created a 10-level proof-of-concept of a port of Lemmings to the Apple II family of microcomputers. This would have blown a lot of minds back in 80s elementary school!

The framerate is pretty low, which isn’t uncommon for 8-bit ports of Lemmings, compare it to the Commodore 64 version. Most versions of Lemmings use some kind of hi-res mode on the hardware, and behind the scenes create levels out of large blocks of premade graphics like in a paint program.

Apple II LemmingsProject page