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0 pointsjustin6625d ago0 comments

> Unfortunately for Franklin, that also meant that full compatibility comes hand and hand with trademark & copyright violations.

Franklin eventually released a couple of clones which were compatible and had a clean BIOS (the 500 and 2000). I'm not sure about full compatibility but I never encountered anything that wouldn't run on my 500. To be fair, I got the thing in the mid nineties and only ran a few programs on it...

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drzaiusx1124d ago

"Copy protections" back in the day often looked for fixed strings in seemingly random places. In the worst cases, this even went outside the machine's memory addresses. Several programs I had would farm this task out to the users and ask for specific words from specific pages in manuals on particular lines. I had to hex dump the binary's lookup tables to even get older software to run many a time ;-)

justin66OP21d ago

I'm not sure why copy protection came up on this thread but when it came to the Apple II, one of the more effective methods was to intentionally include a damaged or unreadable sector at a predictable place on the software's floppy. A standard copy would bomb out on one of these disks, but of course special copy software could do something with a disk like that.

sleepybrett25d ago

Growing up my friend had one (a 500), I don't remember finding anything in my pile of pirated floppies that he couldn't run.

justin66OP24d ago

I assume they used clean-room techniques after those were judged by the courts to be viable. I wonder if that happened because of Franklin's efforts or because of what happened in the IBM PC clone industry.

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