ASCII by Jason Scott

Please spread this as far as possible – I want to reach folks who are far outside the usual channels.

The Summary: Conditions are very, very good right now for easy, top-quality, final ingestion of original commercial Apple II Software and if you know people sitting on a pile of it or even if you have a small handful of boxes, please get in touch with me to arrange the disks to be imaged. apple@textfiles.com. 

The rest of this entry says this in much longer, hopefully compelling fashion.

We are in a golden age for Apple II history capture.

For now, and it won’t last (because nothing lasts), an incredible amount of interest and effort and tools are all focused on acquiring Apple II software, especially educational and engineering software, and ensuring it lasts another generation and beyond.

I’d like to take advantage of that, and I’d like your help.

Here’s the secret about Apple II software: Copy Protection Works.

Copy protection, that method of messing up easy copying from floppy disks, turns out to have been very effective at doing what it is meant to do – slow down the duplication of materials so a few sales can eke by. For anything but the most compelling, most universally interesting software, copy protection did a very good job of ensuring that only the approved disks that went out the door are the remaining extant copies for a vast majority of titles.

As programmers and publishers laid logic bombs and coding traps and took the brilliance of watchmakers and used it to design alternative operating systems, they did so to ensure people wouldn’t take the time to actually make the effort to capture every single bit off the drive and do the intense and exacting work to make it easy to spread in a reproducible fashion.

They were right.

So, obviously it wasn’t 100% effective at stopping people from making copies of programs, or so many people who used the Apple II wouldn’t remember the games they played at school or at user-groups or downloaded from AE Lines and BBSes, with pirate group greetings and modified graphics.

What happened is that pirates and crackers did what was needed to break enough of the protection on high-demand programs (games, productivity) to make them work. They used special hardware modifications to “snapshot” memory and pull out a program. They traced the booting of the program by stepping through its code and then snipped out the clever tripwires that freaked out if something wasn’t right. They tied it up into a bow so that instead of a horrendous 140 kilobyte floppy, you could have a small 15 or 20 kilobyte program instead. They even put multiple cracked programs together on one disk so you could get a bunch of cool programs at once.

I have an entire section of TEXTFILES.COM dedicated to this art and craft.

And one could definitely argue that the programs (at least the popular ones) were “saved”. They persisted, they spread, they still exist in various forms.

And oh, the crack screens!

I love the crack screens, and put up a massive pile of them here. Let’s be clear about that – they’re a wonderful, special thing and the amount of love and effort that went into them (especially on the Commodore 64 platform) drove an art form (demoscene) that I really love and which still thrives to this day.

But these aren’t the original programs and disks, and in some cases, not the originals by a long shot. What people remember booting in the 1980s were often distant cousins to the floppies that were distributed inside the boxes, with the custom labels and the nice manuals.

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On the left is the title screen for Sabotage. It’s a little clunky and weird, but it’s also something almost nobody who played Sabotage back in the day ever saw; they only saw the instructions screen on the right. The reason for this is that there were two files on the disk, one for starting the title screen and then the game, and the other was the game. Whoever cracked it long ago only did the game file, leaving the rest as one might leave the shell of a nut.

I don’t think it’s terrible these exist! They’re art and history in their own right.

However… the mistake, which I completely understand making, is to see programs and versions of old Apple II software up on the Archive and say “It’s handled, we’re done here.” You might be someone with a small stack of Apple II software, newly acquired or decades old, and think you don’t have anything to contribute.

That’d be a huge error.

It’s a bad assumption because there’s a chance the original versions of these programs, unseen since they were sold, is sitting in your hands. It’s a version different than the one everyone thinks is “the” version. It’s precious, it’s rare, and it’s facing the darkness.

There is incredibly good news, however.

I’ve mentioned some of these folks before, but there is now a powerful allegiance of very talented developers and enthusiasts who have been pouring an enormous amount of skills into the preservation of Apple II software. You can debate if this is the best use of their (considerable) skills, but here we are.

They have been acquiring original commercial Apple II software from a variety of sources, including auctions, private collectors, and luck. They’ve been duplicating the originals on a bits level, then going in and “silent cracking” the software so that it can be played on an emulator or via the web emulation system I’ve been so hot on, and not have any change in operation, except for not failing due to copy protection.

With a “silent crack”, you don’t take the credit, you don’t make it about yourself – you just make it work, and work entirely like it did, without yanking out pieces of the code and program to make it smaller for transfer or to get rid of a section you don’t understand.

Most prominent of these is 4AM, who I have written about before. But there are others, and they’re all working together at the moment.

These folks, these modern engineering-minded crackers, are really good. Really, really good.

They’ve been developing tools from the ground up that are focused on silent cracks, of optimizing the process, of allowing dozens, sometimes hundreds of floppies to be evaluated automatically and reducing the workload. And they’re fast about it, especially when dealing with a particularly tough problem.

Take, for example, the efforts required to crack Pinball Construction Set, and marvel not just that it was done, but that a generous and open-minded article was written explaining exactly what was being done to achieve this.

This group can be handed a stack of floppies, image them, evaluate them, and find which have not yet been preserved in this fashion.

But there’s only one problem: They are starting to run out of floppies.

I should be clear that there’s plenty left in the current stack – hundreds of floppies are being processed. But I also have seen the effort chug along and we’ve been going through direct piles, then piles of friends, and then piles of friends of friends. We’ve had a few folks from outside the community bring stuff in, but those are way more scarce than they should be.

I’m working with a theory, you see.

My theory is that there are large collections of Apple II software out there. Maybe someone’s dad had a store long ago. Maybe someone took in boxes of programs over the years and they’re in the basement or attic. I think these folks are living outside the realm of the “Apple II Community” that currently exists (and which is a wonderful set of people, be clear). I’m talking about the difference between a fan club for surfboards and someone who has a massive set of surfboards because his dad used to run a shop and they’re all out in the barn.

A lot of what I do is put groups of people together and then step back to let the magic happen. This is a case where this amazingly talented group of people are currently a well-oiled machine – they help each other out, they are innovating along this line, and Apple II software is being captured in a world-class fashion, with no filtering being done because it’s some hot ware that everyone wants to play.

For example, piles and piles of educational software has returned from potential oblivion, because it’s about the preservation, not the title. Wonderfully done works are being brought back to life and are playable on the Internet Archive.

So like I said above, the message is this:

Conditions are very, very good right now for easy, top-quality, final ingestion of original commercial Apple II Software and if you know people sitting on a pile of it or even if you have a small handful of boxes, please get in touch with me to arrange the disks to be imaged. apple@textfiles.com.

I’ll go on podcasts or do interviews, or chat with folks on the phone, or trade lots of e-mails discussing details. This is a very special time, and I feel the moment to act is now. Alliances and communities like these do not last forever, and we’re in a peak moment of talent and technical landscape to really make a dent in what are likely acres of unpreserved titles.

It’s 4am and nearly morning for Apple II software.

It’d be nice to get it all before we wake up.

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The collection I talked about yesterday was subjected to the Screen Shotgun, which does a really good job of playing the items, capturing screenshots, and uploading them into the item to allow people to easily see, visually, what they’re in for if they boot them up.

In general, the screen shotgun does the job well, but not perfectly. It doesn’t understand what it’s looking at, at all, and the method I use to decide the “canonical” screenshot is inherently shallow – I choose the largest filesize, because that tends to be the most “interesting”.

The bug in this is that if you have, say, these three screenshots:

…it’s going to choose the first one, because those middle-of-loading graphics for an animated title screen have tons of little artifacts, and the filesize is bigger. Additionally, the second is fine, but it’s not the “title”, the recognized “welcome to this program” image. So the best choice turns out to be the third.

I don’t know why I’d not done this sooner, but while waiting for 500 disks to screenshot, I finally wrote a program to show me all the screenshots taken for an item, and declare a replacement canonical title screenshot. The results have been way too much fun.

It turns out, doing this for Apple II programs in particular, where it’s removed the duplicates and is just showing you a gallery, is beautiful:

Again, the all-text “loading screen” in the middle, which is caused by blowing program data into screen memory, wins the “largest file” contest, but literally any other of the screens would be more appropriate.

This is happening all over the place: crack screens win over the actual main screen, the mid-loading noise of Apple II programs win over the final clean image, and so on.

Working with tens of thousands of software programs, primarily alone, means that I’m trying to find automation wherever I can. I can’t personally boot up each program and do the work needed to screenshot/describe it – if a machine can do anything, I’ll make the machine do it. People will come to me with fixes or changes if the results are particularly ugly, but it does leave a small amount that no amount of automation is likely to catch.

If you watch a show or documentary on factory setups and assembly lines, you’ll notice they can’t quite get rid of people along the entire line, especially the sign-off. Someone has to keep an eye to make sure it’s not going all wrong, or, even more interestingly, a table will come off the line and you see one person giving it a quick run-over with sandpaper, just to pare down the imperfections or missed spots of the machine. You still did an enormous amount of work with no human effort, but if you think that’s ready for the world with no final sign-off, you’re kidding yourself.

So while it does mean another hour or two looking at a few hundred screenshots, it’s nice to know I haven’t completely automated away the pleasure of seeing some vintage computer art, for my work, and for the joy of it.

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I was connected with The 3D0G Knight, a long-retired Apple II pirate/collector who had built up a set of hundreds of floppy disks acquired from many different locations and friends decades ago. He generously sent me his entire collection to ingest into a more modern digital format, as well as the Internet Archive’s software archive.

The floppies came in a box without any sort of sleeves for them, with what turned out to be roughly 350 of them removed from “ammo boxes” by 3D0G from his parents’ house. The disks all had labels of some sort, and a printed index came along with it all, mapped to the unique disk ID/Numbers that had been carefully put on all of them years ago. I expect this was months of work at the time.

Each floppy is 140k of data on each side, and in this case, all the floppies had been single-sided and clipped with an additional notch with a hole punch to allow the second side to be used as well.

Even though they’re packed a little strangely, there was no damage anywhere, nothing bent or broken or ripped, and all the items were intact. It looked to be quite the bonanza of potentially new vintage software.

So, this activity at the crux of the work going on with both the older software on the Internet Archive, as well as what I’m doing with web browser emulation and increasing easy access to the works of old. The most important thing, over everything else, is to close the air gap – get the data off these disappearing floppy disks and into something online where people or scripts can benefit from them and research them. Almost everything else – scanning of cover art, ingestion of metadata, pulling together the history of a company or cross-checking what titles had which collaborators… that has nowhere near the expiration date of the magnetized coated plastic disks going under. This needs us and it needs us now.

The way that things currently work with Apple II floppies is to separate them into two classes: Disks that Just Copy, and Disks That Need A Little Love. The Little Love disks, when found, are packed up and sent off to one of my collaborators, 4AM, who has the tools and the skills to get data of particularly tenacious floppies, as well as doing “silent cracks” of commercial floppies to preserve what’s on them as best as possible.

Doing the “Disks that Just Copy” is a mite easier. I currently have an Apple II system on my desk that connects via USB-to-serial connection to my PC. There, I run a program called Apple Disk Transfer that basically turns the Apple into a Floppy Reading Machine, with pretty interface and everything.

Apple Disk Transfer (ADT) has been around a very long time and knows what it’s doing – a floppy disk with no trickery on the encoding side can be ripped out and transferred to a “.DSK” file on the PC in about 20 seconds. If there’s something wrong with the disk in terms of being an easy read, ADT is very loud about it. I can do other things while reading floppies, and I end up with a whole pile of filenames when it’s done. The workflow, in other words, isn’t so bad as long as the floppies aren’t in really bad shape. In this particular set, the floppies were in excellent shape, except when they weren’t, and the vast majority fell into the “excellent” camp.

The floppy drive that sits at the middle of this looks like some sort of nightmare, but it helps to understand that with Apple II floppy drives, you really have to have the cover removed at all time, because you will be constantly checking the read head for dust, smudges, and so on. Unscrewing the whole mess and putting it back together for looks just doesn’t scale. It’s ugly, but it works.

It took me about three days (while doing lots of other stuff) but in the end I had 714 .dsk images pulled from both sides of the floppies, which works out to 357 floppy disks successfully imaged. Another 20 or so are going to get a once over but probably are going to go into 4am’s hands to get final evaluation. (Some of them may in fact be blank, but were labelled in preparation, and so on.) 714 is a lot to get from one person!

As mentioned, an Apple II 5.25″ floppy disk image is pretty much always 140k. The names of the floppy are mine, taken off the label, or added based on glancing inside the disk image after it’s done. For a quick glance, I use either an Apple II emulator called Applewin, or the fantastically useful Apple II disk image investigator Ciderpress, which is a frankly the gold standard for what should be out there for every vintage disk/cartridge/cassette image. As might be expected, labels don’t always match contents. C’est la vie.

As for the contents of the disks themselves; this comes down to what the “standard collection” was for an Apple II user in the 1980s who wasn’t afraid to let their software library grow utilizing less than legitimate circumstances. Instead of an elegant case of shiny, professionally labelled floppy diskettes, we get a scribbled, messy, organic collection of all range of “warez” with no real theme. There’s games, of course, but there’s also productivity, utilities, artwork, and one-off collections of textfiles and documentation. Games that were “cracked” down into single-file payloads find themselves with 4-5 other unexpected housemates and sitting behind a menu. A person spending the equivalent of $50-$70 per title might be expected to have a relatively small and distinct library, but someone who is meeting up with friends or associates and duplicating floppies over a few hours will just grab bushels of strange.

The result of the first run is already up on the Archive: A 37 Megabyte .ZIP file containing all the images I pulled off the floppies. 

In terms of what will be of relevance to later historians, researchers, or collectors, that zip file is probably the best way to go – it’s not munged up with the needs of the Archive’s structure, and is just the disk images and nothing else.

This single .zip archive might be sufficient for a lot of sites (go git ‘er!) but as mentioned infinite times before, there is a very strong ethic across the Internet Archive’s software collection to make things as accessible as possible, and hence there are over nearly 500 items in the “3D0G Knight Collection” besides the “download it all” item.

The rest of this entry talks about why it’s 500 and not 714, and how it is put together, and the rest of my thoughts on this whole endeavor. If you just want to play some games online or pull a 37mb file and run, cackling happily, into the night, so be it.

The relatively small number of people who have exceedingly hard opinions on how things “should be done” in the vintage computing space will also want to join the folks who are pulling the 37mb file. Everything else done by me after the generation of the .zip file is in service of the present and near future. The items that number in the hundreds on the Archive that contain one floppy disk image and interaction with it are meant for people to find now. I want someone to have a vague memory of a game or program once interacted with, and if possible, to find it on the Archive. I also like people browsing around randomly until something catches their eye and to be able to leap into the program immediately.

To those ends, and as an exercise, I’ve acquired or collaborated on scripts to do the lion’s share of analysis on software images to prep them for this living museum. These scripts get it “mostly” right, and the rough edges they bring in from running are easily smoothed over by a microscopic amount of post-processing manual attention, like running a piece of sandpaper over a machine-made joint.

Again, we started out 714 disk images. The first thing done was to run them against a script that has hash checksums for every exposed Apple II disk image on the Archive, which now number over 10,000. Doing this dropped the “uniquely new” disk images from 714 to 667.

Next, I concatenated disk images that are part of the same product into one item: if a paint program has two floppy disk images for each of the sides of its disk, those become a single item. In one or two cases, the program spans multiple floppies, so 4-8 (and in one case, 14!) floppy images become a single item. Doing this dropped the total from 667 to 495 unique items. That’s why the number is significantly smaller than the original total.

Let’s talk for a moment about this.

Using hashes and comparing them is the roughest of rough approaches to de-duplicating software items. I do it with Apple II images because they tend to be self contained (a single .dsk file) and because Apple II software has a lot of people involved in it. I’m not alone by any means in acquiring these materials and I’m certainly not alone in terms of work being done to track down all the unique variations and most obscure and nearly lost packages written for this platform. If I was the only person in the world (or one of a tiny sliver) working on this I might be super careful with each and every item to catalog it – but I’m absolutely not; I count at least a half-dozen operations involving in Apple II floppy image ingestion.

And as a bonus, it’s a really nice platform. When someone puts their heart into an Apple II program, it rewards them and the end user as well – the graphics can be charming, the program flow intuitive, and the whole package just gleams on the screen. It’s rewarding to work with this corpus, so I’m using it as a test bed for all these methods, including using hashes.

But hash checksums are seriously not the be-all for this work. Anything can make a hash different – an added file, a modified bit, or a compilation of already-on-the-archive-in-a-hundred-places files that just happen to be grouped up slightly different than others. That said, it’s not overwhelming – you can read about what’s on a floppy and decide what you want pretty quickly; gigabytes will not be lost and the work to track down every single unique file has potential but isn’t necessary yet.

(For the people who care, the Internet Archive generates three different hashes (md5, crc32, sha1) and lists the size of the file – looking across all of those for comparison is pretty good for ensuring you probably have something new and unique.)

Once the items are up there, the Screen Shotgun whips into action. It plays the programs in the emulator, takes screenshots, leafs off the unique ones, and then assembles it all into a nice package. Again, not perfect but left alone, it does the work with no human intervention and gets things generally right. If you see a screenshot in this collection, a robot did it and I had nothing to do with it.

This leads, of course, to scaring out which programs are a tad not-bootable, and by that I mean that they boot up in the emulator and the emulator sees them and all, but the result is not that satisfying:

On a pure accuracy level, this is doing exactly what it’s supposed to – the disk wasn’t ever a properly packaged, self-contained item, and it needs a boot disk to go in the machine first before you swap the floppy. I intend to work with volunteers to help with this problem, but here is where it stands.

The solution in the meantime is a java program modified by Kevin Savetz, which analyzes the floppy disk image and prints all the disk information it can find, including the contents of BASIC programs and textfiles. Here’s a non-booting disk where this worked out. The result is that this all gets ingested into the search engine of the Archive, and so if you’re looking for a file within the disk images, there’s a chance you’ll be able to find it.

Once the robots have their way with all the items, I can go in and fix a few things, like screenshots that went south, or descriptions and titles that don’t reflect what actually boots up. The amount of work I, a single person, have to do is therefore reduced to something manageable.

I think this all works well enough for the contemporary vintage software researcher and end user. Perhaps that opinion is not universal.

What I can say, however, is that the core action here – of taking data away from a transient and at-risk storage medium and putting it into a slightly less transient, less at-risk storage medium – is 99% of the battle. To have the will to do it, to connect with the people who have these items around and to show them it’ll be painless for them, and to just take the time to shove floppies into a drive and read them, hundreds of times… that’s the huge mountain to climb right now. I no longer have particularly deep concerns about technology failing to work with these digital images, once they’re absorbed into the Internet. It’s this current time, out in the cold, unknown and unloved, that they’re the most at risk.

The rest, I’m going to say, is gravy.

I’ll talk more about exactly how tasty and real that gravy is in the future, but for now, please take a pleasant walk in the 3D0G Knight’s Domain.

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So, Mark Trade and I have never talked, once.

All I know about Mark is that due to his efforts, over 200 scans of magazines are up on the Archive.

These are very good scans, too. The kind of scans that a person looking to find a long-lost article, verify a hard-to-grab fact, or needs to pass along to others a great image would kill to have. 600 dots per inch, excellent contrast, clarity, and the margins cut just right.

So, I could fill this entry with all the nice covers, but covers are kind of easy, to be frank. You put them face down on the scanner, you do a nice big image, and then touch it up a tad. The cover paper and the printing is always super-quality compared to the rest, so it’ll look good:

But the INSIDE stuff… that’s so much harder. Magazines were often bound in a way that put the images RIGHT against the binding and not every magazine did the proper spacing and all of it is very hard to shove into a scanner and not lose some information. I have a lot of well-meaning scans in my life with a lot of information missing.

But these…. these are primo.

When I stumbled on the Patreon, he had three patrons giving him $10 a month. I’d like it to be $500, or $1000. I want this to be his full-time job.

Reading the patreon page’s description of his process shows he’s taking it quite seriously. Steaming glue, removing staples. I’ve gone on record about the pros and cons of destructive scanning, but game magazines are not rare, just entirely unrepresented in scanned items compared to how many people have these things in their past.

I read something like this:

It is extremely unlikely that I will profit from your pledge any time soon. My scanner alone was over $4,000 and the scanning software was $600. Because I’m working with a high volume of high resolution 600 DPI images I purchased several hard drives including a CalDigit T4 20TB RAID array for $2,000. I have also spent several thousand dollars on the magazines themselves, which become more expensive as they become rarer. This is in addition to the cost of my computer, monitor, and other things which go into the creation of these scans. It may sound like I’m rich but really I’m just motivated, working two jobs and pursuing large projects.

…and all I think about is, this guy is doing so much amazing work that so many thousands could be benefiting from, and they should throw a few bucks at him for his time.

My work consists of carefully removing individual pages from magazines with a heat gun or staple-remover so that the entire page may be scanned. Occasionally I will use a stack paper cutter where appropriate and will not involve loss of page content. I will then scan the pages in my large format ADF scanner into 600 DPI uncompressed TIFFs. From there I either upload 300 DPI JPEGs for others to edit and release on various sites or I will edit them myself and store the 600 DPI versions in backup hard disks. I also take photos of magazines still factory-sealed to document their newsstand appearance. I also rip full ISOs of magazine coverdiscs and make scans of coverdisc sleeves on a color-corrected flatbed scanner and upload those to archive.org as well.

This is the sort of thing I can really get behind.

The Internet Archive is scanning stuff, to be sure, but the focus is on books. Magazines are much, much harder to scan – the book scanners in use are just not as easy to use with something bound like magazines are. The work that Mark is doing is stuff that very few others are doing, and to have canonical scans of the advertisements, writing and materials from magazines that used to populate the shelves is vital.

Some time ago, I’ve given all my collection of donated Game-related magazines to the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, because I recognized I couldn’t be scanning them anytime soon, and how difficult it was going to be to scan it. It would take some real major labor I couldn’t personally give.

Well, here it is. He’s been at it for a year. I’d like to see that monthly number jump to $100/month, $500/month, or more. People dropping $5/month towards this Patreon would be doing a lot for this particular body of knowledge.

Please consider doing it.

Thanks.

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