(Wired Magazine) I asked him if he'd ever be interested in getting some geek to take his old Zoid diskette and dump the ROM so he could play it again on an Apple II emulator. He replied:
Yes, I'd be very interested. However, it could prove quite tricky. For one thing, the disk is 24 years old... I don't know what the half-life on those 5.25-inch disks is. For another thing, most of the copies I made, probably including the one I still have, employed primitive copy protection (as we discussed), in which the program checks for a bad sector on the disk before it will run. The bad sector either had a pinhole in it, or was simply left unformatted. The program also wrote the all-time high scores to disk... I'm not sure how the emulators deal with that. If the disk could be read, someone familiar with 6502 machine language and the Apple II + OS would probably have to look through the program and fiddle with those disk-access sections.