Oh My Podd

As I have previously reported here, I have been trying to better archive my author's copy of Podd (a piece of educational software that I wrote way back). It would be nice to keep it on a more permanent type of storage.

My plan was to get my copy running in an emulator, but that wasn't easy since the floppy disk it came on was protected by the publisher. My theory was that I could write a Windows driver to install a virtual drive, then run an Archimedes emulator and tell it to get a disk image from my new virtual drive. This would give me the ability to implement some virtual flakyness to keep the protection routines happy.

Well that was the theory. I didn't know if it would really work. I knew I'd be getting somewhere if the Podd program prompted for registration details. If you just make a copy of the original floppy, the program just refuses to run. But I did indeed get it going, look at this:

Yay! It works! Well... at first, it failed because the emulator (Arculator) cached the disk image, making my virtual flaky sector code useless. Enter the Red Squirrel emulator, which does not cache the disk content. After some tinkering to get the precise collection of bytes to be flaky we were away.

It has been a nice little challenge. I'll post some more Podd screenshots when I get time.