Thread 11925428

Is there a definitive site for downloading games for this thing? Took me forever to find a version of Prince of Persia that wasn't edited by pirates from the 80s

TOSEC romset includes .woz files which are unmodified original disk dumps and Prince of Persia is on of them there.

The current Apple II disk dumping scene is held entirely on the shoulders of a single person known online as 4am, who regularly uploads new unmodified .woz dumps of original disks, as well as produces clean cracked versions of games and programs in a more versatile .dsk format which have copy protection removed but are not defaced in any other ways from their original form. TOSEC catalogs these releases in their yearly updates.
https://archive.org/details/@4am

>>11925432
thank you

starting to really like this machine's games; a lot of history going on here. it's also a nice break from hunting down pure images for ms-dos games

>>11925428 (OP)
>>11925432
If you're using uncracked computer game dumps be prepared to search for manuals and shit to get past the anti-piracy checks
Dunno about the Apple II version, but I know PoP has one on DOS at least

>>11925432
>>11925442
Not OP, but what about the other types of dumps like A2R for example. Can they just be ignored or are they useful for something?

>>11925464
.a2r is overkill for everyday use. It exists to preserve entire magnetic structure of a floppy disk, producing an image several times larger than any data actually stored on a disk. Important if you want to create 1:1 replicas of original disks, but you don't need all that information to play games. .woz format was created as a compromise to contain enough data to replicate disk idiosyncrasies without bloating file size.
If you download any 4am release from the Archive, he usually includes an extras .zip which does contain .a2r files used to dump or crack a disk.

Some older emulators may not support .woz format (it was created in 2010s), so as an alternative you can use .nib format instead to play unmodified disks.

>>11925497
>>11925509
Alright, thanks
So again just to be sure: WOZ for data that's exactly like the original and DSK for cracked games?

>>11925514
Yes, that's two disk formats you actually want to use. Everything else is for historical curiosity or archival preservation.

>>11925428 (OP)
Basically this >>11925442 for clean versions

There's a large anything goes collection that includes other types of dumps. This mainly combines most of the disparate rom collections into one (including 4am). You'll find the typical cracked releases, but also just the basic illegal copies that boot. If you can't find a clean rom, this is probably your 2nd best bet. It also includes some tape conversions which is nice because Apple II tape emulation is bad (just like the tapes and the software on them really).
https://archive.org/details/apple-ii-play-it-by-year-collection-v-0.1

>>11925442
>>11925710
BTW Myrient also has TOSEC dumps:
https://myrient.erista.me/files/TOSEC/Apple/II/

>>11925442
>4am
There's actually an interview from 4am in 2018 where he talks about why he got into dumping and cracking Apple II games, pretty interesting.
>In late 2013, I acquired a real Apple //e and bought a few lots of original disks on eBay, mostly arcade games that I had acquired illicitly in my youth: Sneakers, Repton, Dino Eggs. To my surprise, the originals had more content than I remembered! Sneakers has an animated boot sequence. Repton has a multi-page introduction that explains the “back story” of the game. So I set out to create “complete” cracks that faithfully reproduced the original experience. I decided to document my methods because I enjoy technical writing and because I had admired the classic crackers who had done so. I decided to leave out the crack screens, although a handful of my early cracks do have Easter eggs where you can see “4am” if you know how to trigger it.
>I mentioned this to Jason Scott, and he set me straight. Preservation is driven by pirates, who are driven by ego but constrained by the technical limitations of their era. In the 1980s, this meant storage space and network speed. Nobody got kudos for cracking “Irregular Spanish Verbs in the Future Tense,” no BBS would waste the hard drive space to host it, and no user would sacrifice their phone line to download it. So it never got preserved in any form.
>And even the things that did get cracked weren’t fully preserved. Those same technical constraints led to a culture where the smallest version of a game always won. That meant stripping out the animated boot sequence, the title screen, the multi-page introduction, the cut scenes, anything deemed “non-essential” to the pirates. The holy grail was cutting away so much that you could distribute the game (or what was left of it) as a single file that could be combined with other unrelated games on a single floppy disk.

Play Wily Byte in the Digital Dimension. It's a cute game where you play as a tiny robot inside a computer doing various mini games, with great graphics and even a full Mockingboard soundtrack.

what's wrong with you

https://youtu.be/up863eQKGUI