[RichAplin]

BTW, the SPS has done a lot of good work IMHO;
I heard there was interest in 'watermarking' disks written with a modern device (e.g. cyclone20) so that SPS and other software archeologists would be able to readily detect them and not bother rescanning them or whatever.

I think that's a good idea - with the tools we have now we can easily (I think) modulate the track timing in such a way that provably no old hardware can detect it, yet a machine capable of measuring precise (e.g. 50ns) shifts would know it wasn't an original.

This would also be a test built into the cyclone software, and no personally identifable information would be in the mark - it might simply be a light that comes on in Cyclone. "Is this a 1989 original, or is it a recent re-write?" Yes/No.

No DRM is intended, I think it's respectful to software archaeologists and perhaps to deter casual forgery, e.g. people selling fake disks on ebay.
The latter presumes that (a) Original copies of floppy disk games will become desirable items beyond nostalgic 30-somethings, and (b) forgers won't be able to take out the watermarking functions from the (open source) ARM code. ;-)

Anyway, I like the archaeology concept, it makes all this stuff sound more Indiana Jones.