Pasti and programs without on-disk copy protection. |
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Pasti is also involved for the preservation of disks with no on-disk copy protection. These disks can be imaged with standard tools and stored as standard ST images (ST/MSA). But standard tools can’t verify the condition of the disk. Then a plan ST image might be taken from a disk that is damaged or modified. The Pasti preservation tools can verify a disk for being in “mint” condition or not. We call “mint” a disk that is not damaged or modified. And we obviously want to preserve images taken from disks in mint condition. We are starting to publish cryptographic hashes of images that a Pasti preservation team verified as mint. A cryptographic hash is like a sophisticated one-way checksum, digital signatures are based on these hashes. For programs with no on-disk copy protection, we can compute hashes on standard ST images. If you have an ST image of an original disk, and the hash matches the one we publish, then you know that your image is “mint”. If the hash doesn’t match, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your image is not mint. Many titles were released in multiple versions. So your image might still be mint but taken from a different version. We have compiled a partial list of MD5 hashes, many more to follow soon. MD5 is the most common type of cryptographic hash, and most operating systems have free tools to compute MD5 hashes. For Windows, you can use the Microsoft “fciv” utility available from Microsoft web site. We list multiple versions if we have verified more than one. We include the publisher and, if available, other details such as version number. Note that most of these games still have some form of copy protection. Usually they have manual protection (words, codes, code-wheel, color-chart, etc) and in some cases they require a dongle. Only a small minority has no copy protection at all. MD5 Table |
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