[Coco] Question about disk images & copy protection.

Alan Jones ojones at elp.rr.com
Tue Jul 4 10:52:01 EDT 2006


Ken, thanks for making the software available.
I tried to run the program in MESS emulator ver. 0.106 and I am getting 
a ?FS error

Alan

Kenneth Schunk wrote:
> You were right - I didn't want the copy protection, but TCE (who had
> bought the rights to DEFT Pascal) did. I had written a graphics
> package for DEFT, and ended up doing the upgrade to V 4.1 to make it
> CoCo3 compatible. Since they made me put in copy protection I decided
> to make it rather obvious - there is one missing sector on one track
> track 36 or 37, some sector or another. The copy protection checks to
> see if it can read other sectors on that track and that it can't read
> the missing one. One simple subroutine call that can get replaced by a
> NOP set was put into the linker code. TCE used the same copy
> protection on their Business Writer program (which wasn't all that bad
> of a word processor) and Ark Royal did the same on a couple of their
> games.
>
> Ted at TCE never did any marketing for the DEFT Pascal or the graphics
> package (or, as far as I could tell, his word processor) which went a
> long way to explaining the almost zero dollars in royalties that I
> received for the work. He got into some kind of feud with Lonnie right
> around then - Ted claimed that Rainbow wouldn't review any TCE
> software until TCE bought some serious ad space. True or not I don't
> know, but there were never any ads or reviews for any TCE stuff, and
> there were maybe twenty sales of the Pascal upgrade, and less than
> that of the graphics package. I had intended on writing a CoCo 3
> version of DEFT and the graphics package - 80 column text, hi(gher)
> res graphics for the graphics system, but with sales like that it
> never made it to the priority list.
>
> If you want the unprotected DEFT you can get it at:
>
> http://www.kenschunk.com/coco/DEFT.html
>
> Ken
>





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