[Blindapple] Looking for copy protection expert

[Tony Baechler]

Hi all,

If you're good at breaking copy protection, I'm looking for you.  My
interest is not in breaking the law, but rather in making games talk.
Obviously, not all games will talk by their nature, but many can be made to
work once the copy protection is broken.  Examples include at least two
Penguin games, which have now been released as freeware.  If you've studied
the Eamon history, you'll know that Donald Brown tried to commercialize it
and called it SwordThrust.  Quite a number of those exist, but due to the
copy protection, CiderPress can't read them and I can't use them with
speech.  However, the master disk had the protection broken and it's
standard Applesoft, not much different than standard Eamon.  Yes, I suppose
technically what I'm asking for is illegal, but in this case, the date on
the master is 1981 and Donald Brown has stated that he has no interest in
Eamon and Apple software at all anymore.  There are other examples as well,
but you get the idea.  I have no idea where to start with most of those
disks and cracking copy protection wasn't ever a particular interest of
mine.  Other random examples might include Ultima I as it looks like mostly
standard text, Bronze Dragon (not copy protected, but does something to
disable Textalker) and a lot of other early text adventure and RPG games.
Actually, the post here asking about those got me thinking and I realized
how simple it would be to get many of them to work if I could modify the
base programs.  Often it takes relatively little effort to adapt a game for
speech once the protection is broken.

Can anyone here help?  You'll have to be able to read and manipulate .nib
images.  MESS can read them, but they don't catalog like normal DOS disks,
even though I believe they are.  Probably the catalog is on a different
track, but this is really beyond my experience level.  Thanks all for any help.