Clock Bits Protection

Clock Bits Protection

This is a protection where invalid GCR was used. Most commonly known as ‘weak bit’ protection. This was the most difficult protection to detect unless you were using a 1541-II or 1571 disk drive. Neither of these drives would ‘float’ invalid bits like a 1541 does. So, you can easily spot these and correct the data before being re-written. – Jim Drew

 

Sync Bytes Protection

Sync Bytes Copy Protection

Sometimes you would find protections counting the number of sync bits in a row or timing the duration of series of sync bytes to see if they matched. These were difficult to duplicate because we really didn’t have much control of the data separator. We had to write routines that calculated the bit length for every sequence and handle sync bits a little differently. – Jim Drew