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Comment by hotcrossbunny | Hacker News Reader

Need a bad sector on your disc? No problem, just make a little sticky tape handle on the last edge of the disk in the drive. Open the drive door, leaving the disc in and spinning. Then wait till the computer says go, and pull really hard on the disk against the drive head. I couldn't believe this worked back when I was 10.

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You don't need to do that. I encountered bad sectors when copying Atari games as a kid. The copy program I was using wouldn't copy bad sectors, which meant that the protection was effective. But I realised you could use a sector editor to read bad sectors and more surprisingly, actually write them. So the solution was a full disk copy and then write a bad sector and you were done.

The Atari drives (810/1050) could not write bad sectors. They were "intelligent" peripherals that implemented their own command set and were not under low level control by the host computer. There was an aftermarket modification "happy board" that could be installed in the drives to allow it to write many types of bad sectors, allowing for the copying of protected software. The board also improved the speed of the drive.

Yes, I had a "Happy Chip" modded Atari 810. The damn thing could copy almost anything you throw at it. In the early 80's as a teen,I used to copy protected original disks and modify the code to bypass the copy protection routines. Had a massive collection of Atari 8-bit games. And yes, I'm ashamed of my past thug life.

I cracked a couple of games (that I owned - Fort Apocalypse, and some other one) by disassembling (by hand) the boot code and NOPing out the copy protection checks with a hex editor - I think I actually used a Forth utility to do that part.

I got my Amiga second hand and it came with shoe boxes full of games ... "some" of which were undoubtedly copied. I remember looking at all of those disks and being blown away. Not sure I even played them all!

I'll take your word for it. I might of being thinking of the C64 instead. I never had any after market mods for the Amiga, though I did have a few for the C64: Action Replay cartridge and some special cable for connecting multiple disk drives.

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