PC Floppy Copy Protection: Xemag Xelok(martypc.blogspot.com)
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PC Floppy Copy Protection: Xemag Xelok
https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/10/pc-floppy-copy-protection-xemag-xelok.html
3 comments
Probably a silly question. but are those images of a disks layout high enough resolution to recreate the disk?
I know it's silly because if you wanted to encode a disk image such that it works as a png you would not use a circular layout. Too many weird angles, it would make it harder than it needs to be to reconstruct.
I know it's silly because if you wanted to encode a disk image such that it works as a png you would not use a circular layout. Too many weird angles, it would make it harder than it needs to be to reconstruct.
For the ones that I make to look pretty, the data is colored in buckets of 8 bits, using the bit-count per byte to select a shade in 8 steps from 0-255. So there's at least 8 times less data than you would need. Then it is downsampled 4x to get nice antialiasing, so that is more data loss.
I do have a bit-mode, and if you rendered at high enough resolution you could do it, maybe something like 32k x 32k. But this is a very inefficient way to store a disk image. :)
I do have a bit-mode, and if you rendered at high enough resolution you could do it, maybe something like 32k x 32k. But this is a very inefficient way to store a disk image. :)
I find it humourous that their logo looks like what happens when older generations of Windows failed on popups.
Or when you win solitaire!
Xelok was quite devious on the Apple II, implementing "fat tracks" that could not be produced with a conventional disk drive. However the PC doesn't allow such tricks, so Xelok appears a bit different on the PC platform.
We take a look at two titles that use it, Sargon III and The Ancient Art of War.
We also take note of a rather amusing bypass for this protection!