The main goal of this project is to archive pristine versions of original Commodore 64 software, including copy protection. A secondary goal and benefit of this will be to catalog and document all the different copy protection methods used. This information will be used to improve emulation, as well as allow remastering of the software onto new disks for you to enjoy on the real thing.

Of course, to reach these goals, we need your help. This software exists only on magnetic media from the 1980's, and as such has been disappearing into attics, yard sales, and landfills for 20-25 years. Floppy disks were also never made to last a lifetime, as I have found in purchasing them in auctions. Even disks that were stored and cared for by their owners all these years have pretty high failure rates, including some where the magnetic material actually wipes right off, making the drive heads filthy.

You can help preserve them for our own and future generations in a number of ways.

* If you have a 1541 or 1571 disk drive and a XEP, XAP, or XMP cable (serial/parallel combination), we can send you the latest mastering software. You can then send us the resulting image and statistical data for analysis and inclusion in the archive.

* We will happily pay for postage to get any original disks you have to us! We will promptly image them and send them back to you.

* If you don't have the cabling or don't wish to send us your originals, you can make us nibbled copies of the originals by whatever the best means you have and send us those. We will pay for postage, as well as return these disks to you, of course. We can sometimes reconstruct the protection onto the image by looking at what it checks for, plus they can be used to verify the original image if nothing else.

* Join the discussion forums and ask any questions or make any comments you like about the project or copy protection in general.

Hello friends,

Due to various problems reported with newer versions of nibtools, I've rolled back all the code to the last (hopefully) known stable version - 0.7.6. I've merged a few of the known good changes done since then (fillbyte support) but removed all the newer changes/tweaks to track cycle detection and density detection that caused so many issues.

This needs to be stabilized mainly for Nate to work on the ZoomFloppy, and for those kind members who are imaging disks again after a long break.

Anyone using a newer version than 0.7.6, please delete the executables and download the version on the site. Any images you have created are probably good, but conversions to G/D64 from those images could be faulty.

As always, thanks to everyone who is testing and reporting bugs. I've found it's an exercise in futility to tweak the code to support a new foreign image without breaking support for some of the 1000's before it. :(

-
Pete Rittwage
C64 Preservation Project.
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0.8.7 has been released. It fixes an issue where a single timeout will kill the current track read instead of retrying properly.
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Well, it is finally happening. I think we are nearing the end of the MTBF shelf-life of blank floppies manufactured in the 80's.

I have boxes and boxes of unused "Scholastic", "Inacomp", and "Syncom" disks and nearly all of them have errors out of the box. :(

They did all mostly work 10 years ago or more when I got them from auctions, and stored in a good environment for all that time. I noticed that I didn't seem to be able to write/read good images lately and thought at first I had munged something up in NIBTOOLS, but no... They won't format on any of my drives anymore, and fail at different points during the process (repeatable).

Nobody is still making new 5.25" DSDD floppies anymore, are they? I fear we may be at the end.

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See nibtools page for latest release. Mostly just bugfixes. Better density detection for some 1571 drives, and updates to the nibscan comparison tool.

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I made a patch for this a long time ago and though I'd offer it out to anyone wanting to try to implement something similar.

The samples aren't great, but they're OK. I recorded them myself from a real 1541 twist-door drive with a Logitech USB mic, 45 degrees off axis from the center of the spindle on an open drive. They are kind of loud, and there was also some noise I tried to remove with audacity, but that caused some odd aliasing. I left it that way because the aliasing was better than the 60Hz hum. :)

I would submit it to VICE, but I won't waste their time, as it's a bad hack for many reasons. Mainly, it's not cross-platform compatible and just uses Playsound() calls directly from drive.c (included in archive).

I also included the "seek" sound, but can't get it to play reliably without further abstracting what the drive "is about to do". The calls for head step are always called to step one track only, so you'd have to put in a timer to see if it had been called very recently and play the seek instead. I couldn't get this to work reliably. Instead, the regular click sound is played repeatedly. If the head moves very quickly, this is distorted because of the way Playsound works. :(

Grab it (and make a better version than I did) from [link]
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Recently, a few different people sent me some disks for imaging. Thanks very much to each of them for taking the time.

Ernie Rymer
"Justin"
Tom Bies

Tom had an almost complete set of the CBM Educational series disks that were in good condition.

Of the "known" releases, we are missing:
English VI
Mathematics IV
Mathematics V
Mathematics VI

It isn't yet known how many disks were in the "Games", "History", or "Science" series. Does anyone recall?

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Hi guys,

With the help of "TeaRex" on my forum, I added a simple way to read/write disk images using the index hole sensor built into the 1571. Through this addition, a revelation occurred.

We had always assumed (since the 80's) that the Electronic Arts' "fat tracks" protection had 2 tracks (34 and 35) perfectly aligned. I added the index hole code and wrote out the disk perfectly aligned to track 0 and thought it was beaten. :)

Well, it turns out this assumption is *not* true. When reading against the index hole, track 35 is actually skewed back 1/4 track or so on all the original disks. If I write it back out skewed in this way, it boots. These were never "FAT" tracks at all, just a specific track skew between two identical copies of a track.

XEMAG 2.0 (the Activision variety of this protection) is skewed about 1/2 track between 35 and 36 (and some amount between 34 and 35 also that doesn't appear to be checked).

I noticed years back that this protection boots if the drive motor is slowed down to 298.5 or lower (within reason) no matter what the skew. I guess something about how their timing check is setup allows this to pass.
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I finally took a look at this protection with some disassembly help from a friend of the project who wishes to remain unnamed.

It turns out to be just a sync length check, but it's very specific about the length it needs to be. It needs to see right around 1024 bits (128 bytes) within about 8 bits either way, otherwise it formats the disk. The 1541 isn't very good at giving us exact sync lengths, so I had to patch it.

Convert the images with "-r" so it doesn't reduce syncs and it will play in VICE (usually) and remaster fine.
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A new version of Vampyre Cross is available for the Commodore 64. You can download it here:

[link]

Thanks,

Paul

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I have some free time for the holidays so I decided to break out the old soldering iron and rescue some boards.

I had an old 1984 board that got zapped by a bad power supply. Replaced a few RAM chips, and sacrificed a PLA from an old Rev. A board, and a SID from a dead 1983 board, and it's back from the dead. :)
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If you haven't heard of 1541 Ultimate yet, have a look at [link] for what it's about.

It's an amazing device, but currently only supports .d64 images. I'm hoping to run originals on one of those, so I've had some words with the author over e-mail about the upcoming .g64 support.

Presently the work seems very promising; it has already ran a V-MAX! title, a Maverick-copied Vorpal title, and some earlier games with simple schemes. There's been some problems too, but the work is still underway.

A limiting factor is the unfortunate lack of test materials. Of particular interest would be something using weak bits or half-tracks, but some good examples of other schemes would probably be of use too.

If anyone in possession of some working .g64 files with interesting schemes on them is at liberty to send them to info(at)1541ultimate.net to help the development of 1541 Ultimate, that would certainly be appreciated.

(I have nothing to do with 1541 Ultimate apart from hoping to make good use of one in the future)
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I uploaded a newer build of NIBTOOLS for testing. It includes adjustments and bugfixes from the last several months.

Also notable is the addition of ZIP support for image reading. This currently requires that 'unzip' be in your command line path to function.
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Thanks to Matt Larsen for sending in a box of disks, some of which aren't even in Gamebase yet! :)

Also, Thanks Christian Lott and Tom Bies for sending in your collections for imaging.
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Thanks very much to Gabriel Borchsenius and Joe Ricci, who recently sent in their disk collections for archiving. Thanks guys!

Also thanks to Kenneth Kill Jr. for sending a monetary donation for site upkeep and good will. Thanks Ken!
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