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MartyPC brings cycle-accurate IBM PC emulation to your web browser.

Run Area 5150 at 60fps on your phone!

Almost every feature from the desktop version is present if practical:

- View the realtime state of nearly every component of the system. - View live disassembly of CPU instructions. - Edit registers and memory. - Slow down or speed up the system. - Peek on how games draw their graphics with the Memory Visualizer.


This isn't necessarily a new technique, as black and white art has been put on floppies before: https://github.com/bzotto/picturedsk

But the new wrinkle here is support for grayscale, meaning photos or other grayscale artwork can now be put on a disk.

We can even put the art inside of valid sectors to keep the disk appearing completely normal to casual observation from a host computer.


For the ones that I make to look pretty, the data is colored in buckets of 8 bits, using the bit-count per byte to select a shade in 8 steps from 0-255. So there's at least 8 times less data than you would need. Then it is downsampled 4x to get nice antialiasing, so that is more data loss.

I do have a bit-mode, and if you rendered at high enough resolution you could do it, maybe something like 32k x 32k. But this is a very inefficient way to store a disk image. :)


Or when you win solitaire!


In this post in a series on PC copy floppy protections, we take a look at XEMAG duplication's "Xelok" scheme.

Xelok was quite devious on the Apple II, implementing "fat tracks" that could not be produced with a conventional disk drive. However the PC doesn't allow such tricks, so Xelok appears a bit different on the PC platform.

We take a look at two titles that use it, Sargon III and The Ancient Art of War.

We also take note of a rather amusing bypass for this protection!


An investigation into the infamous 80's copy protection scheme PROLOK that involved burning holes on diskettes.

Also included is an interview with Quaid Software founder, Robert McQuaid. Vault sued Quaid Software for producing CopyWrite, a utility that could copy PROLOK protected diskettes.


EA's INTERLOCK protection (Marble Madness) uses deleted address marks.


An in-depth dive into the Macintosh floppy drive system, including the fascinating IWM (Integrated Woz Machine) custom floppy controller. The level of fidelity to properly emulate the Macintosh disk drive is impressive, and this should be an essential resource to any aspiring Macintosh emulator developers.


Consider applying for YC's Summer 2025 batch! Applications are open till May 13

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