Zoid

published by unknown, running on Apple II E
This game has not passed the prototype stage.
type: puzzle
perspective: other fixed camera
player options: single player
other: Prototype
languages: eng

Official description

(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.

Zerothis - # 2008-05-29 12:10:12 - official description - David X. Cohen

Description

Yup, this game was made by the David X. Cohen of The Simsons, Futurama, and cromulent fame. He was once addicted to arcade games and was determined to be the first to make a Qix clone for Apple][. He did, completely coded in assembly. Submitted only to Brøderbund for publishing; they rejected it. A loss for videogame arts became a win for animation arts. There is but one known copy of this game remaining on a 24 year old 5.25" disk pinned to the cork board in Mr. Cohen's office. Yes, pinned, its a type of copy protection. The game actually checks a section of the disk looking for a 'hole' in the data; and there's literally a hole in it. To create a working copy of the disk, one would need to puncture the copy in precisely the same place. Mr. Cohen has an open invitation for geeks to help him dump the game for emulation purposes. So far, no takers.

Oh, and Dr. Zoidberg from Futurama got his name from this game.

(Zerothis) - # 2008-05-29 12:05:56

Technical specs

display: raster

Tags (4)

Contributors (2)

AndreaD
zerothis

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