Please wait...
Donno. But this stuff wouldn't qualify for gold i'm sure. Such minute amounts.
Sun Jul 28 2024 16:58:37 EDT from nonservatorIs recycling electronics for the gold, copper etc still a thing?
Since i dont really DO anything anymore and that old hobby is dead, i dont normally pay attention to the weekly ( or so ) flyer i get from 'electronic goldmine' ( sort of like polypack from the 80s )
But this weekend they have "C.P. Clare Type 26 10 Pole 26 Position Rotary Stepping Switch" for 200 bucks. A real work of art. Back when men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And one more bit of proof we dont NEED to digitize everything that moves.
anyone remember the days when staroffice had pretty much anything a 'user' would need, in one interface?
- Office suite
- browser
- even a terminal emulator to dial into BBSs with.
- and some other stuff
Miss those days. Even bought a license, just before sun bought them, ripped it a part and opened up what was left. World was simpler back then. ( and about the time many of us bought a license key for Blender.. and it fit on ONE floppy )
or i could go further back, Asthon Tate's Framework... Run it on DesQview X.. Supported local multitasking windowing stuff, but also remote X11, remote windows.. great stuff. ( and ya, i paid for all those too, and ouch was Framework III expensive back then )
Oh and ya i ran it on DR DOS. not MS DOS. Was not a fan of them even back then. Damned thieves and manipulators.
LoL, ya. i had forgot about that. Lots of facepalming going on back then.
Thu Nov 14 2024 18:48:49 UTC from IGnatius T FoobarHeh. I remember when the clueless people pronounced the name of DR-DOS as "Doctor DOS". :)
since talking a bout old *DOS dayas...... Back when floppies had physical copy protection 'keys' on them ( mostly physically bad sectors ).
Not that i was a hard core pirate ( even if i played on on TV a times ) i had a memory resident utility: dejavu
What you did is load up your copy protected application, it would check the disk, grant access, then you would use this to snapshot ram to another floppy.. Next time you just loaded the snapshot and you in effect by-passed the protection. AND you could make copies of that for backup purposes, and distribute them.. by accident of course.
Aside from the pirate angle, those copy protected disks were really unstable so there was a legit need for that sort of tool.
Had a tool that also would copy protected disks ( for backup use.. really.. ) and it would somehow inject the proper errors into the right sectors. I dont think that was ever released as a commercial product, for obvious reasons.
Fun times. Kids today will never know....
Had a tool that also would copy protected disks ( for backup
use.. really.. ) and it would somehow inject the proper errors
into the right sectors. I dont think that was ever released as
CopyIIPC could do this with its add-on option board. Had a hardcore-pirate friend who had one. He fancied himself a librarian of commercial DOS software and had pretty much everything he could download or trade for. Wonder what ever happened to that collection...
yes that was it.. i could not think of the name. I kept thinking PCDitto, but no, that is the emulation product for Atari ST. ( tho i had both of those boards... if you are going to do it, *do it* )
As well as the mac emulation board for the Atari ST. It used real ROMs. Was a real shame about that mac that fell off the desk at work and had to be scrapped due to a broke case/monitor and out of warranty. ( lol, i didn't do it, but i did not let it go to waste )
CopyIIPC could do this with its add-on option board. Had a hardcore-pirate friend who had one. He fancied himself a librarian of commercial DOS software and had pretty much everything he could download or trade for. Wonder what ever happened to that collection...
Oh and speaking of "emulation" boards... While not technically emulation since it was real hardware, I had a Z80 board for the apple II series ( ran it on a ][GS for a while towards the end, those were cool machines ) that let you run cp/m. Came from Microsoft, of all companies...
Well, this is cool. An AtariST emulator via javascript. Not 100% true emulation of course, and not overly 'useful' but still cool.
https://kaiec.github.io/EstyJS/
CopyIIPC could do this with its add-on option board. Had a hardcore-pirate friend who had one. He fancied himself a librarian of commercial DOS software and had pretty much everything he could download or trade for. Wonder what ever happened to that collection...
Ah yes, the cat and mouse arms race of the copy protected floppy disk years.
Someone would come up with a new way of making the floppy drive error out in a predictable way, then use it as part of a copy protection scheme, after which someone else would update a disk copying program to detect that type of error and reproduce it in copies of the source disk. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum.
I was playing around with Commodore 64 and later the Amiga during those days. By the time I had a hard disk I was playing around with Unix systems and had lost interest in the kind of software that required a copy protected floppy disk.
Someone would come up with a new way of making the floppy drive
error out in a predictable way, then use it as part of a copy
protection scheme, after which someone else would update a disk
copying program to detect that type of error and reproduce it in
copies of the source disk. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum.
They tried that with CDs, actually, and some copy protection schemes were very good. Not unbeatable, but good.
I think there is a Linux Magazine article scheduled for January about the subject. Nutshell follows:
At first, CD games required you to answer questions whose answers were contained in the game manual in order to play. You would launch the game and at some point the program would as you "Which is the third word of the forurth sentence at page 40 in the manual?" Considering most games were copied over but didn't have their manuals distributed with the pirate copies, that kind of made sense for a brief time.
Then they started performing simple checks against the CD. The popular one was requiring the game to have the CD in the tray. The game would check the label of the CD before launching, and refuse to run if the CD with the proper label was not inserted. This was a trivial thing to workaround.
Then they started messing up with the CD itself. One of the earliest strategies to prevent a CD from being copied was to press them with so many defective sectors that disck copying software would error out before completing a transfer. Soon afterwards, they started including bad sectors in the CD with manipulated error correction data: the game would check if the bad sector was there and consider the CD legit if so. However, disk copying software, upon trying to replicate the CD, would find the defective sector and "fix" it with the manipulated error correction data, so any copy of the game would not have the defective sector and therefore end up not recognized as legit.
So far, these mechanisms were easy to foil, but things got really weird with data positioning measurement (DPM), in which the CD was pressed with known sectors whose position was known by the program. The game would read the bad sectors and map their phisical position on the disk by measuring how much time it took for the CD to skip from one to the other. This system was hard to fool because domestic CD burners cannot replicate precise data topologies - meanwhile, mass commercial CD creation is doing with presses rather than burners.
DPM is nowadays a defeated technique because you can extract an image with a program capable of taking DPM measurements and then mount the CD image with a CD emulation driver that passes DPM data through to the program -famous examples are cdemu for Linux and Alcohol 120% for Windows.