MAME 0.248 supports .moof files, which are disk images of copy protected Mac floppy disks. ("Moof" is the sound a dogcow makes.)
Hey, that gives me an idea.
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“A Moof A Day”
Macintosh .moof disk images of copy protected software, verified in multiple emulators, full metadata, downloadable or playable in your browser. Also: raw flux files, visualizations, handcrafted screenshots, &c.
The Surgeon v1.5.moof
https://archive.org/details/moofaday_The_Surgeon_v15
Thanks to @ianoid for the disk!
King's Quest v1.10.moof
https://archive.org/details/moofaday_Kings_Quest
Thanks to @ianoid for the disks!
Indiana Jones and the Revenge of the Ancients.moof
https://archive.org/details/moofaday_Indiana_Jones_in_Revenge_of_the_Ancients
Winter Games 1985-10-31.moof
(Yes, they re-released it one week later.)
Star Trek: The Kobayashi Alternative.moof
https://archive.org/details/moofaday_Star_Trek_The_Kobayashi_Alternative
Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It r19.moof
Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego.moof
https://archive.org/details/moofaday_Where_in_Time_is_Carmen_Sandiego
Deluxe Music Construction Set v1.0.moof
https://archive.org/details/moofaday_Deluxe_Music_Construction_Set
Border Zone r9.moof
https://archive.org/details/moofaday_Border_Zone_r9
Thanks to @ianoid for the disk!
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy r47.moof
https://archive.org/details/moofaday_The_Hitchhikers_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_r47
This one is kind of a big deal. The game has never been cracked, it was last imaged in the mid 1990's, and that image is nonfunctional because it didn't fully capture the disk's protection. It is also exceedingly rare; the Mac port did not sell well, and the game did not work on any Macs beyond the Mac Plus. It last showed up on eBay a decade ago. When it showed up earlier this year, a group of like-minded archivists pooled donations and were able to win the auction and preserve it properly.
If you play The Quest from an unauthorized copy, it lets you play for long enough to read the introduction and go buy stuff from the shop. Then on the way out of the shop, a huge Red Dragoon and company appear from nowhere complaining about software pirates, drag you away to the dungeon, and the machine reboots.
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Championship Star League Baseball.moof
https://archive.org/details/moofaday_Championship_Star_League_Baseball
This is something you would never know unless you were a Mac developer in the 1980s, but basically all of Apple's developer documentation assumed you were writing in Pascal, with a few insane people writing in assembly (but usually just a little bit, then integrating it with Pascal).
Hahaha when I said "preserved properly" I might have jumped the gun. It turns out this disk has MULTIPLE protection checks against MULTIPLE different parts of the disk. All custom, nothing off-the-shelf, and EXTREMELY integrated into the game itself.
One of them is a small region of "weakbits" that returns random data every time you read it. Applesauce usually cleans these up automatically, but this one is so small (and custom) that it needed additional manual cleanup in A2R -> MOOF conversion.
The original has an unfortunate bug (visible in the screenshots here) that it uses a hardcoded address to draw the graphical inventory on the screen, which breaks after the Mac 128K because Apple moved the address. (You're supposed to look up the address in a low-memory global, but they didn't.)
Nothing to be done about it with the moof; it is what was shipped. qkumba cracked it and fixed the inventory bug after removing the protection check.
Also developer tools were expensive and copy protected. This version of Macintosh Pascal had on-disk structural protection that prevented copying it or using a copy, and four separate protection checks at various points in the runtime.
Wait, did I say "extremely integrated into the game itself"? Why yes, yes, I did. It turns out, if the game fails the first protection check, it puts up a "please use original disk" message and reboots. BUT if the first check passes but the second check fails, you can start the game but will immediately fall into endless "chance" encounters with increasingly difficult opponents where your attacks always fail, your attempts to escape always fail, and they inevitably kill you.
We cleaned up the "weakbits" region in our digitized file and resumed testing. The .moof image now appears to work properly (MAME supports protected .moof images), passing ALL protection checks under emulation... that we know of. But, faced with this uncertainty, I broke out the big guns, called in a favor, and procured some real hardware for additional testing.
![main application screenshot from "][ in a Mac"](https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/109/616/120/257/668/567/original/4d4c4315a682902a.png "main application screenshot from \"][ in a Mac\"")
![user guide screenshot from "][ in a Mac"](https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/109/616/120/498/748/745/original/9a32d3c63b9598c3.png "user guide screenshot from \"][ in a Mac\"")
![about box screenshot from "][ in a Mac"](https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/109/616/120/692/636/303/original/ded4562c8d05e2fb.png "about box screenshot from \"][ in a Mac\"")
![flux visualization of "][ in a Mac" disk](https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/109/616/121/137/626/736/original/d9224008cf22edc0.png "flux visualization of \"][ in a Mac\" disk")
No it can't run Passport. It provides its own drive controller firmware at $C600 that Passport doesn't recognize, and beyond that there are other problems due to (reasonable at the time) liberties it takes with disk handling.
So far, I can confirm—booting the original disk on real vintage hardware—that just standing around in the opening town will get you accosted by a gallery of thieves, couriers, champions, and wizards... some of whom you can not escape before they do damage. But you *can* eventually escape, so I guess that's just how the game works.
Testing under emulation is also going well, except I spent too much time and money day drinking in The Inn and now I'm hungry, thirsty, and cold.
That was just to get it working WITH the copy protection. Now @a2_qkumba is trying to crack it (for the first time ever) and running into a whole new world of pain. Suffice to say this game REALLY does not want to you tamper with the copy protection code.