Commodore Free 6/Commodore_Free_Issue_06_2007_Commodore_Computer_Club.d64/t.iv rittwage

Text File | 2007-01-01 | 8.9 KB | 317 lines

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     Interview with Pete Rittwage
       C64 Preservation Project

 Q -  Please Introduce yourself to our
Reader, Where do you live, What do you
do for a living

A - I am a Senior Network Engineer
from Augusta, Georgia, USA that grew
up in the 8-bit computing era during
the reign of the Commodore 64. My
original goal was probably that of a
lot of retro users.

 I wanted to recollect all the games I
had for the C64 when I was a kid,
which for most part were games that I
either copied (or later cracked) from
friends in the Northeastern Ohio (USA)
area.

It always bothered me when I got a
copy of a game where the text was
edited with silly "BROKEN BY" or
"CRACKED BY" phrases, so I would
always remove them and put back the
original text. Later, we were
inundated with the "intro demo" which
usually saw the loss of the title
screens and original loading graphics.
I sought to remove those as well.

 From there it expanded into
collecting original disks. After
discovering Markus Brenner's MNIB
project, I decided it was better to
just try to collect all the games as
they were originally distributed. That
way you avoid any errors or missed
protection checks that the 'cracker'
left behind. This opened up into the
can of worms you see in the software
and on the site today.

Q - What introduced you to Commodore

A - I received a Vic-20 for my
birthday in 1983 or so.  After the C64
came out, then VIC was marked down to
less than $100, so my parents were
able to afford to get me one.  I had
no tape drive for about 6 months until
I got one for Christmas. During that
time, I would type in programs from
magazines and debug all my typos,
which is how I learned programming.

But of course when the computer was
turned off, they were gone.  :( I
purchased a C64, 1541, and 1525 in
1985 or so (used) from a friend of my
parents who was "upgrading" to an IBM
PC.  I moved to Georgia a couple of
years later, sold all my C64
equipment, then bought an Amiga 500 in
 about 1988.  Later (1991) I went to
work for a Commodore dealer and was
surprised how many people still used
the C64.  I had a almost a full time
job repairing them for a year or two.

Q - What Commdore machines do you own

A - Pretty much anything they made
that was in color.  VIC-20, C16, a
couple of +4's, an original badge
breadbox (S/N 25000 or so), many
rainbow badge 64's, a pristine SX-64,
a couple 64C's, a couple 128's, Amiga
600, Amiga1200, Amiga 1000, a couple
of Amiga 500's, a dozen or so 1541's,
1571's, and 1541-II's.  I have plenty
of parts to last my whole life. And a
couple thousand original disks at this
point, about 1/3 with boxes. Nothing
sealed, of course.  :)

Q - where did Commodore go wrong

A - Well, I worked for a CBM dealer
when they went under, and the owner of
the store owned CBM stock (and
actually went to the last stockholder
meeting in the Bahamas).  It became
clear that the leadership at CBM did
not want to invest the money in
becoming a mainstream computer company
in the 90's. So they just drained what
they could until it collapsed.  I
could write a whole essay on their
mistakes, but this was the ultimate
downfall in the end.

Q - Commodore Preservation Society -
please tell our reader the main aim of
this website

A - To collect and document all floppy
disks released for Commodore
computers.

Q - I have printed the FAQ file from
the site but you must receive some
really dumb questions can you
Enlighten us

A - Actually, you'd be surprised. Most
people that still use C64's or play as
a hobby are quite computer literate,
so I don't get many dumb questions at
all.

Q - would it ever be possible to
recreate a duplicate disk from a Nib
Copy

A - Most images, yes, you already can.
 Some won't work due to the
limitations of the drive hardware, but
some of that can be worked around.
Probably 97% of images can be
remastered without problems.

Q - Please tell our reader about the
process and the NIB copy format

A - The NIB "format" is really nothing
more than about a cycle and a half of
raw GCR data as it's seen passing over
the drive heads on each track. The
parallel connection inside the drive
sends this GCR data out in real time
to the PC which stores it in this
simple file format.

This file is then analyzed, the track
cycles are determined, and then
converted to G64 (or D64 if
appropriate) for use in emulation.  I
usually briefly analyze the copy
protection (manually) and make note of
it.  I then use other tools I've
written to compare the data to other
known images of the same title to see
if it's unique in some way.

Q - What will happen to the game
copies if the website closes

A - There are many contributors to the
project that have backup copies of
everything, so if I disappear
hopefully someone will carry the
torch.

Q - How can our reader help your
project

If you have any original disks and
have access to the hardware to read
them (XAP, XMP, or XEP combo cable)
then feel free to contact me to
contribute images.  If you don't have
the hardware, then you can send the
disks to me or other project members
that may be in a country nearer to
you.  I can even pay for postage both
ways, if you wish.

Q - Do you copy the documentation and
disk covers?

No, but there is a site called "The
SixtyFour Originals Database" that
does this.  It's too much for me to
handle all of that too, so it's good
to have different projects.

Q - What about tape preservation or
have you deliberately left this to
others

A - There are a couple of other
projects doing this as well.  Tapes
aren't plentiful in the USA (most
software was on disk here) so I leave
that  to people with more expertise in
tape preservation.

Q - What is the worst copy protection
scheme you have come across and has
any scheme had you unable to produce
a disk copy

A -Big Five's "Bounty Bob Strikes
Back" is written in a format like
"Spiradisk" (from the Apple II).  1/2
of each track is written, and the head
bumped 1/2 a track in the middle, then
repeated again and again For about 12
tracks.  This is very difficult to
copy or write back out because of
timing issues.  No copy program ever
succeeded in making an exact duplicate
(without cracking it).

There is a special copy program for
the SuperCard+ that is supposed to
work, but we've tried it on two
different originals with 3 different
drives and never gotten it to produce
a working copy. The other very
difficult ones are mostly due to track
skew.  On the 1541,there is no way to
accurately align tracks to one another
without adding an index hole sensor.

 Some protections (like Rapidlok)
check timing between certain patterns
on neighboring tracks and fail if they
are even a bit off For this reason,
these games don't completely work in
emulators, as they don't yet emulate
track skew or exact stepper motor
timings. Long tracks, such as those
used in V-MAX or the newer
Vorpal-protected disks (like
California Games, etc) are no problem
for emulators, but The disk drive
motor must be slowed way down to fit
all the data on the disk when
remastering them.

Q - So where does it go from here, is
this just to Continue collecting disk
images

A - That's pretty much it.  Nobody
knows how many games were released on
disk for the 64, so we'll never know
when we're done.  We're about to reach
about 2,000 unique titles, and there
are about 3500 disk sides that make up
those titles.

 Also, there are many games which were
released in different versions,
different regions (PAL/NTSC and
language differences) as well as
re-releases on budget labels, etc.
It's a big job.  I probably spend a
between 3-10 hours a week on it just
going through images and disks trying
to keep up with our kind contributors.

Q - Can a user create an image and
send it to you for the Database if so
how would they create the images

You need a 1541 (preferably an
original model as they are more
reliable), a PC (running DOS, Windows,
or Linux) and an XAP, XMP, or XEP
combo cable. This cable has the extra
parallel connection soldered into the
drive like the 'Datel Burstnibbler' or
'21 Second Backup' used back in the
old days.

Q - Many of the Commodore games can be
downloaded from various sites, these
are normally cracked with intros and
cheats, although this does allow in
many cases the games to be played with
newer or extra hardware for example
run from Cmd products, like hard disk
and Ram - its nice to run the real
version of the software, the problem
is how long will my disk drive last
constantly bumping the heads about,

A - Only the earliest copy protections
that check for an intentional disk
error have this problem.  The old
original drive mechanism with the
pull-down (as opposed to the
twist-down) are less reliable and
should be avoided for these earlier
disks.

 I've got a 1541 drive with the
twist-down door  that I've used to
read probably 10,000 images with and
it still works fine,  so the hardware
is pretty reliable if you have a good
drive.  If it  breaks, though, there
are plenty left 'in the wild' for
years to come.  :)

Pete Rittwage
C64 Preservation Project
http://c64preservation.com


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