Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!apple!bionet!agate!ucbvax!decwrl!sun!imagen!atari!portal!cup.portal.com!BobR
From: BobR@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: RE: Writing to write protected disks
Message-ID: <9783@cup.portal.com>
Date: 6 Oct 88 04:57:26 GMT
References: <881004015530.736833@PCO-MULTICS.HBI.HONEYWELL.COM>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 23
XPortal-User-Id: 1.1001.5368

In reply to Aric Freisen's comments that MichTron's "Pinball Factory" uses a
weird format and writes to the disk, write protected or not...
 
In order to save time when mass-producing their disks, MichTron generally does
NOT format the entire disk, but only formats the actual tracks that the
program and files will be using.  Thus customers have had difficulty backing
up some disks by using the "Drag the disk drive Icon" method of copying an
entire disk.  In these cases, the disks may possibly be backed up by copying
them file-by-file (assuming the disk is not otherwise copy-protected).
 
I can't say for certain, but what *might* have happened when Aric tried to
save a pinball game he'd created, to the master disk is... with the write
protect off, a partial file could have been written on whatever spare sectors
were left over from the partial formatting.  This partial file may have still
shown up when trying to write to the disk when subsequently write-protected..
it's possible that the Pinball Factory does not report an attempt to write
to a protected disk as an error  (many MichTron games do not), but simply
returned to the menu, leaving the partial file from before...
 
(Naturally this last is all speculation on my part, as I'm not about to try
writing to my original Pinball Factory disk to check it out..! :)

BobR  (Give me time, I'll eventually come up with a fancy signature..!)