Hi, I bought a vintage floppy disk of Frogger for the Apple //e. It was still shrink wrapped with the original Our Price Records price tag which was pretty cool.
I had nostalgic fun opening it (couldn't resist) but the disk just boot loops.
It displays a one line copyright notice at the top of the screen for a millisecond:
"SPIRADISC (TM) SYSTEM (C) 1982 BITWORKS"
Then says "REBOOTING" and cycles like that.
The label on the front says "II/II+" and of course I'm running it on a "IIe" so I suspect that's the issue. I only just got the machine, and the one and only other disk I have (An Introduction to the //e) loads fine.
The weird thing is though, I used to own exactly that same game in the 80s and it worked fine on my //e!
Oh! You didn't mention Spiradisk in your post over there. That is a very sophisticated copy protection scheme that is very sensitive to machine differences.
A deprotected version with no extraneous crack screens was recently and expertly done by someone known as "4am" - you can download it from Asimov here:
http://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/images/games/action/frogger/
Hey David, thanks and well spotted. I didn't realize it was Spiradisc until after that post 'over there'
The message at the top of the screen on the //e was so fast I couldn't read it. I found out on this page, once I'd translated it from French.
I'm still not sure why it ever worked on my childhood //e but thanks, I've ordered ADTPro cables and will try the hack. I hope SpiradiscTM no longer mind
Some of the former disk protection shemes worked with speed and alignment of the drive....
so maybe at your old IIe the diskdrive had other "better" alignment of track and speed...
that´s one of the reasons in former days the guys ( at least the hackers ) often had 2 spare drives specialy for
examining the disks previous of hacking the protection...
speedyG
Hey IIeBoy,
I'm the author of the message you're pointing to.
I didn't investigate more but the Spiradisc protection isn't very reliable.
It should work on a IIe as far as it is an unenhanced one as Antoine points out in the original thread.
You just have to find the correct drive...
Thank you all! Most informative. And congratulations to Spiradisc for still keeping us on our toes today.
I'm going to try getting a hacked version working, then maybe copy that over the original floppy disc itself so it as "as good as" the real thing.
Detailed information can be found on Andy's Site.
That was a fascinating read. Thank you!
I used ADTPro to copy the cracked version back onto the original Frogger disk. Now I have a fully working version!