"Cracking" software to preserve it is akin to taking a picture of artwork and letting the original rot away in my opinion. Sure, some of the original bit patterns are intact, but it's not close to an original in any sense of the word. Cracking has its own pitfalls, such as secondary protections within the program which check if the protection is intact. And of course the most major aspect is the art which is the copy protection is totally lost. So in my opinion few is any disks have really been preserved. One however could argue unprotected disks like System Masters are preserved. So as in the picture analogy you do get an idea of what the disk contained, however its in no means "preserved". Closest I can come to a definition is "emulated". Luckily we have some hope on the near horizon - Applesauce: https://wiki.reactivemicro.com/Applesauce It will fully backup Apple II, Commodore, and Atari disks. And by "backup" I mean preserve the actual flux transitions as they appear on the floppy medium. It's really neat to be able to see the disk's fingerprint. They way the fluxes are laid out allows for each image to be IDed much like a fingerprint. You can see damage to a disk, and even when the drive head is dirty. https://wiki.reactivemicro.com/Applesauce#Applesauce:_The_Software Over 3000 sides of Apple II protected programs never before imaged have been achieved with no issues. These will be released with a new website, and users of the Applesauce will be able to upload their own images also. Even better news is Applesauce is about to be released for presale. I've had the pleasure of working with John Morris and seeing a lot of the inside workings of his project. Truly the greatest Apple II project there could ever be and it's going to be a real game changer for the retro Community. We also have plans for a hardware based floppy emulator to fully take advantage of the new .WOZ format for newly imaged programs. There will proably be some chatter here about the release, but be sure to subscribe to the ReActiveMicro.com Newsletter to know instantly about sales and project release updates: https://www.reactivemicro.com/news/email-newsletter/ </end shameless plugs> Henry S. Courbis Office Toll Free: (800) REACTIVE (732-2848) Office/Mobile Direct: (856) 779-1900 www.ReActiveMicro.com <http://www.ReactiveMicro.com> - Sales, Support, and News, Our Headquarters on the Internet ReActiveMicro.com/wiki - Support, Software, Manuals, and History. Create your own page today! Facebook.com/reactivemicrousa - Our Social Media Outlet and Support On Wed, Mar 28, 2018 at 7:29 PM, Christopher Gioconda via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Admittedly I'm a Commodore guy, but this link about Apple software preservation was shared in a Commodore group on Facebook.
It made me think about our recent conservation conversation, and I had a realization it isn't just about hardware. Software mediums, like floppy diskettes and tapes, are falling victim to entropy and require efforts to preserve them in new ways that are more durable and futureproof.
Anyway, here is the link: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gv39mx/ programmers-are-racing-to-save-apple-ii-software-before-it-goes-extinct
Chris