[Coco] Question about disk images & copy protection.

[Kenneth Schunk]

You were right - I didn't want the copy protection, but TCE (who had
bought the rights to DEFT Pascal) did. I had written a graphics
package for DEFT, and ended up doing the upgrade to V 4.1 to make it
CoCo3 compatible. Since they made me put in copy protection I decided
to make it rather obvious - there is one missing sector on one track
track 36 or 37, some sector or another. The copy protection checks to
see if it can read other sectors on that track and that it can't read
the missing one. One simple subroutine call that can get replaced by a
NOP set was put into the linker code. TCE used the same copy
protection on their Business Writer program (which wasn't all that bad
of a word processor) and Ark Royal did the same on a couple of their
games.

Ted at TCE never did any marketing for the DEFT Pascal or the graphics
package (or, as far as I could tell, his word processor) which went a
long way to explaining the almost zero dollars in royalties that I
received for the work. He got into some kind of feud with Lonnie right
around then - Ted claimed that Rainbow wouldn't review any TCE
software until TCE bought some serious ad space. True or not I don't
know, but there were never any ads or reviews for any TCE stuff, and
there were maybe twenty sales of the Pascal upgrade, and less than
that of the graphics package. I had intended on writing a CoCo 3
version of DEFT and the graphics package - 80 column text, hi(gher)
res graphics for the graphics system, but with sales like that it
never made it to the priority list.

If you want the unprotected DEFT you can get it at:

http://www.kenschunk.com/coco/DEFT.html

Ken