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This month on Open Apple, we sit down with Mark Pilgrim, one of the most active software preservationists in the Apple II community. Mark has been spending his free time working on Passport, an automated cracking tool. It automatically detects and defeats copy protection schemes on Apple II disks, producing copyable disks that are otherwise completely intact. This is a boon for preservation of software that has only been (poorly) cracked by hoodlums of the past, or is previously uncracked. The latter is very common with educational software, business packages, and other things that the old crackers weren’t interested in. Mark’s skills and perseverance are making it possible to use more and more Apple II software on sites like Archive.org and VirtualApple.
KansasFest 2017 will be July 18th-23rd at Rockhurst University!
Meanwhile, tune in to this show and listen to Quinn and Mike bumble through news of various festivals, discuss lots of new hardware, and utterly fail to be respectful of the passing of a computer science legend. We’re sorry, Mr. Papert- you will be missed, and Logo touched all our lives.
There are a record number of amazing announcements of hardware and software this month. You won’t want to miss Passport, Ancient Legends, 4soniq, CP/M Turbo 7, SD-MIDI, and more. It’s an incredible month for spending money on your Apple II.
Go download Passport and archive all your floppies. Start now, or you’ll be up very late.
More information on everything discussed in this episode, after the jump.
- Mike Willegal : Home of the Apple 1 Registry, among many other things.
- Mark Pilgrim : Cracker, writer, preservationist extraordinaire.
- Passport : Mark’s automated cracking and preservation tool.
- Passport Intro : Mark’s amazing presentation at KansasFest 2016
- MECC : The educational software consortium that is a target of Passport for preservation
- Ship of Theseus: The most literary (and Quinn’s favorite) guest-uttered metaphor.
- Passport workflow : A great sample of how to use this powerful utility.
- GEnie and Delphi : Archived for all time.
- KansasFest 2017 : Next year’s dates already announced. Book it now!
- KansasFest 2016 : This year’s sessions and notes now online.
- Cult of Mac does KFest : The mainstream is all up in our business again.
- WOzFest $04 : It happened! Read more about it.
- Apple II Festival France : It also happened!
- VCF West : Guess what? It happened!
- Space 4048 : A charming lo-res vertical shooter in production now.
- Call A.P.P.L.E books : More reprints from ye olde user group.
- Marina IP : Perhaps the final update to this remarkable piece of TCP/IP software.
- GitHub Collation : A nice round-up of every Apple II project on github. Great reference!
- Logo Inventor Passed Away : Seymour Papert’s pen has gone down for the final time.
- Ancient Legends – Brand new, finished game by the Lawless Legends team. Yes, really.
- Halt And Catch Fire Season 3 : It’s baaaaa-ack. Play spot-the-Commodore.
- Inner Circle : Former member of a hacker group tells all. Again.
- MIDI, VGA, RAM, oh my! : Plamen is at it again with great new hardware.
- SD-MIDI : Ian Kim’s MIDI card.
- CP/M Turbo 7 : Another marvel from Ian Kim, coming soon.
- 4Soniq : Manila Gear’s marvelous IIgs sound card now available.
- Mugs and stuff : Retrobright guru Javier has made mugs and stuff.
- French Touch : Playing music while loading from a floppy disk. Yes, really.
- Kaboom! updated : Now supports 4-PLAY joystick card.
- Nox Archaist contest : Winners of the tile art contest have been announced.
- Woz-autographed Apple I : Up for auction. Get out your chequebooks.
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