Adventures in PC Emulation

 This is part 2 of a series on PC floppy copy protection methods.  You can read Part 1, covering Formaster Copy-Lock here . Softguard Systems was founded by Joseph Diodati, Paul Sachse and Ken Williams in 1983 ¹ . The company went public in 1984, and by 1985 was one of the industry leaders in copy protection technology, although they produced a few other unrelated products as well. Advertisements for their copy-protection product, SUPERLoK, were commonly seen in the classified sections of publications such as InfoWorld and PC Magazine: The original Superlok product required professional disk duplication to lay down the requisite copy protection track. Eventually, Softguard would produce the "SUPERLoK KIT," which was writable with a standard PC floppy controller. An advertisement for the Kit can be seen above, left. The Kit version was aimed at smaller developers on a budget, and did not offer the same level of protection. This article will focus on the original ...

Preface This is Part 1 of a series of articles investigating various PC floppy protections, as I get them working in MartyPC . It assumes you have a familiarity with the structure of a PC floppy disk and the basic operation of a PC floppy drive. Thanks Thanks to NewRisingSun on VOGONS for his vast knowledge of copy-protection schemes and history, and to OBattler for his extensive knowledge of PC floppy controller operation. Formaster Corporation  The Formaster corporation, headquartered in San Jose, CA, sold disk duplication equipment such as the FORMASTER Series One, pictured below. Courtesy of VintageComputing.com InfoWorld   Sept. 19, 1983 Such machines may have been attractive investments for medium-sized software houses. Not only would it allow a software company to reproduce their own diskettes in bulk (up to 326 disks per hour, depending on options), the Formaster Series One could also add basic copy protection to each disk. The Series One started at $25,400US , or near...