Apple Lisa Personal Computer
1983 to 1985

 

Unprotecting Apple Lisa Office System Tool Files


David 7 Craig - 21 February 1993
736 Edgewater, Wichita, Kansas 67230 - (316) 733-0914


This document contains some technical information relating to the Apple Lisa personal computer. The information in this document describes a procedure that unprotects a protected Lisa tool program. For an earlier discussion of this topic see my document Apple Lisa 7/7 Tool Deserialization (1988).

A protected Lisa tool is a tool that can not be copied nor opened on another Lisa except bg the Lisa Office System's Desktop Manager which created the 'protected matter'. Even the Lisa Workshop development environment can not open a protected tool file.

WARNING

The following procedure can be hazardous to the health of the disk on which
it is applied. As such, backup the disk first, then follow this procedure on
the COPY, not the original.

T he easiest way to unprotect a tool is to modify an certain area of its floppy disk. The Macintosh program FEdit is very handy for this process. The disk modification applies to a disk area containing the tool's file system information. A tool has a name with the formal "{Tx}0BJ" where 'x' is a number (eg: LisaWrite has the name "{T1}0BJ"). The tool's name must begin at the beginning of a sector (preceeded with a length byte). Basically all you need to do is:

1. Mount the Lisa tool disk with FEdit on a Macintosh.
2. Locate the area holding the tool name and its file system information.
3. Tell FEdit to let you modify a disk section.
4. Clear (ie set to ZERO) around 40 bytes after the tool name.
5. Save the changes to the modified disk sector.
6. On a Lisa, run the Workshop (or Office System) and SCAVENGE the disk (OPTIONAL).

You should now have an unprotected disk copy of a Lisa tool disk.

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