[justin66]

> Unfortunately for Franklin, that also meant that full compatibility comes hand and hand with trademark & copyright violations.

Franklin eventually released a couple of clones which were compatible and had a clean BIOS (the 500 and 2000). I'm not sure about full compatibility but I never encountered anything that wouldn't run on my 500. To be fair, I got the thing in the mid nineties and only ran a few programs on it...

[drzaiusx11]

"Copy protections" back in the day often looked for fixed strings in seemingly random places. In the worst cases, this even went outside the machine's memory addresses. Several programs I had would farm this task out to the users and ask for specific words from specific pages in manuals on particular lines. I had to hex dump the binary's lookup tables to even get older software to run many a time ;-)

[justin66]

I'm not sure why copy protection came up on this thread but when it came to the Apple II, one of the more effective methods was to intentionally include a damaged or unreadable sector at a predictable place on the software's floppy. A standard copy would bomb out on one of these disks, but of course special copy software could do something with a disk like that.

[sleepybrett]

Growing up my friend had one (a 500), I don't remember finding anything in my pile of pirated floppies that he couldn't run.

[justin66]

I assume they used clean-room techniques after those were judged by the courts to be viable. I wonder if that happened because of Franklin's efforts or because of what happened in the IBM PC clone industry.