[Coco] Upgrade to Colorzap

[Robert Gault]

Steve Ostrom wrote:
> 

> 
> Robert, does this mean it will read and copy many of the copy protected 
> Coco disks?  If not, how much work would be needed to add that 
> functionality, sort of like an improved Spit 'N Image program?
> 
> -- Steve --
> 
> 

Spit 'N Image was a good idea but it will fail on many different types 
of copyrighted disks, particularly recent ones. Colorzap-93 will work 
with these disks but on a sector by sector basis. It therefore is not 
intended as a whole disk copy utility.

I've been thinking about this problem and may write a new program or 
suite of programs to copy "any" disk. There are three parts to the 
problem, 1) determine the disk structure, 2) format an identical 
structure on a new disk, and 3) copy all sectors from the original to 
the old disk.

With many of the most recent Coco products, the tricks used to copy 
protect disks prevent automatic processing even with simple schemes. One 
example, is to create tracks with values that are illegal in FM or MFM 
format. A second, is to have multiple sectors with the save ID number 
but different data. It seems to me that having separate programs to 
perform each of the above three steps, with human analysis of the 
results, is the way to go.

It is fairly simple to write a Read Track program in ml. with a Basic 
interface which asks for a track #, makes one or more copies, and saves 
them to disk. It is then up to the user to locate the ID address marks 
and determine what the structure is. While this could in theory be 
automated, the Western Digital controllers used with the Coco are very 
bad at performing track reads without data corruption. As a result, 
patterns that can't be recognized by routines but are easily seen by 
eye, are common.

Making generic format programs, is not very effective with patterns that 
may change from track to track. It is much easier to modify a format 
table by hand than to attempt to automate the process.