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From: hatcher@INGRES.BERKELEY.EDU.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: RAM disk
Message-ID: <8705200749.AA17673@ingres.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Wed, 20-May-87 03:49:16 EDT
Article-I.D.: ingres.8705200749.AA17673
Posted: Wed May 20 03:49:16 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 21-May-87 06:32:35 EDT
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In article <1117@crash.CTS.COM> spierce@pnet01.CTS.COM (Stuart Pierce) writes:
>There are a number of disk-intensive, copy-protected programs that I would
>like to be able to run from a ram disk as they don't seem to take much
>advantage of extra RAM.  Some of the programs must be started from a warm-
>reboot.  Is there any way to do this?         -- Stuart Pierce --

Assuming you have sufficient expansion ram, you can do this by copying all
files from the copy-protected disk to a directory in ram. Usually only one
file is protected, and it is checked upon startup of the program. Once you
start the program and it checks the copy protection, use Amiga-N/M to
switch back to a workbench screen (if the software disallows this then
you're probably out of luck). Assume the diskette is named "Defender".
Pop it out of the drive, and use CLI to "assign Defender ram:dirname",
where "ram:dirname" is the place that you copied the files from the diskette.
Then go back to the game, which will continue getting files from the
device named "Defender", not noticing that you've pulled a switch on it.

The basic idea is to go ahead and let the software validate the copy-
protected file on its diskette as usual, then once it's running have it
access all its other, non-protected files from ram disk.

The main problem with copying the files is that the copy command will want
to stop as soon as it fails on the one copy protected file. You must get
around this by either using a fancier copy command (e.g. dirutil) or by
setting up a script to copy each file individually.

This procedure has worked on lots of different games I've tried it out on,
but there are some that capture all keystrokes, so that Amiga-M/N doesn't
switch screens. Conceivably something might screw you up by using the
workbench screen rather than a custom screen, too. PopCli might still help
you in such a case, if you can do a A-ESC to get a CLI on top of the game's
screen. The most foolproof scheme is to use something like Marauder to
deprotect the disk, then just copy the whole disk to ram disk, and go
ahead and execute the "s/startup-sequence" script that they provide for
warm-booting their software.
	Doug Merritt			ucbvax!ingres!hatcher