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 Copy Protection Methods

 Copy Protection Methods
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 Copy Protection Methods

 Copy Protection Methods

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 BanguiBob's Rapidlok 1
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 Fat Tracks - Early EA
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 Copy Protection Methods

The goal of this project is to educate the reader about floppy drives, floppy disks, recording methods, as well as the history and methods of copy protection used on magnetic media. This information is used to help you recover data and improve emulation of these old devices and software, as well as help allow 'remastering' of the software back onto disks, so you can enjoy them as they were originally intended, on the real hardware.

Of course, to reach these goals, we need your help. This software exists only on magnetic media from the 1970's to the 1990's, and as such has been disappearing into attics, yard sales, and landfills for decades. Floppy disks were never made to last a lifetime, as many of us have found when trying to archive them. Even disks that were stored and cared for by their owners all these years can have pretty high failure rates.

You can help preserve them for our own and future generations in a number of ways, so please use the contact form for details or ask in the forums.

I have been a computer hobbyist since the early days of personal computing, worked as a consultant in the computer industry for over two decades, and have been involved in the disk preservation community for over a decade. I have written several emulators and software conversion tools to read old media into image files for use on modern computers.

One of the most common question I get is "I have all these old disks, but I don't have any way to read them. Can you help?". Some are users that have old data from school projects or old software they wrote as a kid that they'd like to see again, and some are companies or attorneys that have old disks with records that need to be used for auditing or legal cases.

Can we help? Of course. We can recover the data from virtually ANY magnetic media created with ANY computer. Please visit the "shopping cart" section of the site for details, pricing, and payment information.

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C64 Preservation Project

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