AMIGA Virus Protector - But does it work? There’s a few shocks with this!
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- Опубликовано: 7 июн 2024
- I have to admit, this video didn’t actually go quite to plan. I had a bit of a brainwave after I'd finished editing it and ended up having to create another section on the end, and it was WELL WORTH IT!
A while back, I discovered a device that you could plug into the external floppy drive port of your Amiga that supposedly would protect any disk inserted from becoming infected with boot block or boot sector viruses.
Curious how such a simple device could achieve this feat I decided to put it to the test.... and wow, was I surprised...
AMIGAAAAAAA!
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📖 Chapters
(00:00) A Curious Device
(00:21) What is a Boot Block Anyway?
(01:40) Unpacking and Initial Tests
(04:01) Amiga Test Kit and X-Copy
(04:47) I Concerned About This!
(07:15) My Concerns Confirmed
(07:29) Guessing How I Think It Works
(09:47) Lets Tear it Apart!
(10:08) OH NO! I thought I was Finished!
(10:54) Testing a Hunch (testing a bypass!)
(11:59) Throw it in the bin!
🎧 Music Used
• "Pookatori and Friends" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
• "Laser Groove" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
• "Son of a Rocket" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
• "Envision" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
• "Decisions" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
• "Aerosol of my Love" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
• "One Sly Move" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
• "Bleeping Demo" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
• "Split In Synapse" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
• "Neon Laser Horizon" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
• "Holiday Weasel" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
• "Constance" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
• "Fluffing a Duck" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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#amiga #antivirus #retro 
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Even if it did not protect effectively, nor apply its protection only to the correct sectors - its a billion times more real than I expected. I was 99% sure it would be a snake oil feel good switch that was not connected to anything. Anyway super cool video, top notch presentation and funny topic, - RUclips algorithm on a roll today, absolutely no clue how it figured a video about Amiga would humor me.
This video has gone crazy for me too, I’m not sure what I did right but I’m not complaining about it! Thanks for watching!
@@RobSmithDev oh as someone who has never seen you before: your presentation was energized without getting annoying, the device itself is like some arcane magic, we are basically on for the heroes journey. It being too locky adds tension. Then finally finding out direct I/O just bypass the entire device is like the perfect resolution. The pacing of the story is kind of perfect, you never get the “err to slow maybe click something else” not the “annoying presenter going crazy, let’s go somewhere else where it isn’t insane speed”. So the device itself, the presentation style, the different ups and downs… it’s all kind of perfect for geeky viewer that likes speed without crazy super speed. So it kind of makes sense that algos who compare viewer patterns, tempo and other strange metadata can distinguish this as something that could be a hit with people who barely seen amiga but appreciate similar videos.
Wow thanks for the feedback! Great to hear I’m doing it all correctly - I always wondered about my pacing and in the past I probably went a little fast - my guess is YT tried a different group of people for this video and found you, and I’m so glad it did 😃 Really appreciate your insite
Your brainwave and characterization of DMA writes as 'naughty' cracked me up
😂 glad you were entertained 😃
I think that this switch is more effective as you may think.
A virus needs to be very small, especially a boot-sector virus. The boot sector needs to stay in working order so there is not much space for the virus and its "payload". Implementing its own write routines would make it a lot bigger - even too big to work for hiding inside the boot sector.
So a virus uses all the code of the OS or ROM of a machine it can to stay as slim and sleek as possible.
On a C64 drive, there is no hardware write protection at all. The Floppy-OS just checks the notch and decides if it may write or not. A small change in the Floppy-OS using a few Bytes of code in the virus can disable the write protection.
I think it’s possible. The boot sector has 1024 bytes and a minimal boot block actually only needs 49 bytes of that. If it used the OS to do everything except the Write it should be possible. The code I used to write the track wouldn’t amount to much code at all. Assembling the buffer slightly more but still loads of space
I remember being ridden with the Saddam virus...... A friend of mine made me a diskette that killed it in memory, and installed a hotpatch so I could boot the disk and then swap for the disk suspected of being infected and clean it.
Saddam was nasty...... Installed itself on the boot block and slowly but surely made the whole disk unusable
The virus does need to be small enough to fit on the boot sector - it just needs to contain a jump command to another sector.
This is also very true!
Even if a virus needs more space than 1024 bytes, it can "make" it.
1. by marking a block as "bad blocks" in the file system. The formatting routines in the OS never uses that when doing it's job. It will rather warn that the floppy is damaged. But will look in the "bad block" list to ignore them when writing files.
2. by going beyond track 79. Nearly all floppies could read and write tracks 80 and 81 without a problem. A lot of space for additional code.
These where also known ways to make "copy protected" floppies.
3. by adding stuff to the end of existing files. Nearly all more complex file formats had a header that had a total length count of the file and the reader wouldn't go beyond that. So adding stuff to the end of a file wouldn't be visible by default. Executable or libraries where the main target.
while i never owned a 500, i did own a 600 and a heavily invested in a 1200, with HDD (a huge 6mb) 2nd floppy and the ram upgrade. Thanks for taking me back to my childhood.
Even though it is only 5£, I would still call it a ripoff 🙂
lol given the findings absolutely - although these days that 23pin connector probably sells for that!
@@RobSmithDev good point 😃
Given the age 5£ was a lot of money, in my school days we sang a song where it said you had to pay a 5£ fine if you used a train's emergency brake inappropriately.
@@gentuxable true enough. I used to save my pocket money all month just to afford a copy of Amiga Format!
@@gentuxable Years ago I was in the train where woman used emergency brake because she thought she missed the train station. Conductor said to her that, if pulled during high speed all train wheels needs to be fixed and that would cost easily hundreds of thousands.
@robsmithdev: Keep up the cracking work mate.
I love these videos, deep diving into all sorts of cool and interesting things
About our favourite computer.
I always learn something new or interesting.
Cheers.
Thank you!
Damn, boy. Quality content like this deserves another sub!
Thank you
I enjoyed this video very much. Subscribed!
Welcome aboard!
It would be more interesting to find out what is in the dongle for Power Copy ?
Stay tuned…
Very interesting video!
Glad you enjoyed it
Some drives included this, i wonder if they were connected to the sensor directly or again just on the drive connector
G'day mate just found your channel today actually! Love me an Amiga, had a 600 with ram expansion, 40MB HDD (not cheap in Australia at the time). By smeg did the Dune games get a thrashing!
Glad you found my channel. Are you in touch with any of the Amiga groups in Australia? I knows there’s a few
Cool video! :) Try test the Iceboot, u can get it in aminet to clean resident virus when booting the amiga.
It’s a good plan. I used to also install special boot blocks that would do vector checks on boot too! (Plus if they disappeared you knew!)
I remember having one of those.. I can't remember how i acquired it but it didn't get much use.
I have a few of these dotted around.
CarmenWorld is still my most functional Kickstart disk (if I need one)
At first I didn't get it why you could write by using hardware directly but I guess write protect on the drive uses it's drive controller to inhibit writing whereas the /wp signal is software based for the Amiga internally and can be ignored.
You can consider the /wp signal as like the "Paper out" line of the Centronics printer interface. The printer is unable to print and the computer can tell by looking at the Paper-Out line why. This is just a "For your Information" thing.
In case of the OS using a disk, it will check if its able to write before it tries to write. This prevents confusion since there is a cache which will be out of sync if the OS tries to write but failed.
Absolutely!
Ah, a fellow A500+ owner. :)
I’d never get rid of it, my first, and original machine 😃
@@RobSmithDev I loved my Amiga. And I miss it... 😭😭
Rob, I’ve got 2 different Amiga disk copying dongles, I could send you a photo and if you’re interested, send them to you do do a video. I’ve always found them interesting, but have no idea how they work, someone said they synchronous the internal and external drives?
Coming to a future video...! but by all means, please send some photos incase they're different to what I have. Probably easiest if you find me on my discord server
@@RobSmithDevI have 2 of them, one is labelled the other isn’t. I will try to find you on there lol
Lamer! Lamer! Lamer! Lamer! Lamer! Lamer! Lamer! Lamer! Lamer! What a time to be alive
Possibly one of the more unusual comments I’ve had on this channel so far
The most irritating Lamer Exterminator virus for me as a dev back then. Checking with DiskX to see what was wrong and seeing that ‘Lamer!” string all over one’s hard work. Shocked you’ve never across it.
Rings a bell now I understand the context! but no, didn’t encounter it. I have memories of the Saddam virus but not sure if I ever actually saw it, the (cough) disk sharing at my school was obviously not as good as others experienced!
@@RobSmithDev There's an overly technical vid on RUclips (which is just our sort of thing, right guys?) if you search Lamer Exterminator pt 2/2 (don't bother with part 1) which explains in *great* detail how the bootblock viruses like SCA and Byte Bandit evolved from ruining any disk with a custom bootblock into savage beasts that would just attack sectors on the disk with that "Lamer!" string over and over. A bootblock could be recovered (only a few hundred bytes) but your masterpiece IFF Dpaint pic or your amazing Soundtracker MOD... lost forever.
I’ll have to take a look, cheers
I wonder if some of the issues you had at the beginning were due to using a newer Amiga OS? Maybe 1.x might not have had some of the issues?
lol well if you’ve watch to the end you may have realised it doesn’t matter anyway!
@RobSmithDev I did and I know, but the critical design flaw wouldn't have been as obvious as all the disk errors....until they were infected.
@tech34756 my guess is the plan was for it to be used to protect ‘copied games’ where there wasn’t any actual writing going on most of the time
@RobSmithDev Going of my brother's usage back in the day though, they barely ever touched Workbench, just booting games straight from Kickstart.
Overall I would just go with this being a flawed product, reminding me of those fans you get for consoles which are supposed to help with cooling but can (from what I've heard) cause more harm than good, especially if this made people think they were 'immune' to malware.
So that begs the question. Could you actually make a device that blocks writing to the first to blocks of a disk?
I guess you could, but I think it would need to physically sit between the drive and the cable and block the writing properly. The Write Gate line would need to be held high. If you went to that trouble though I’d make it do that for track 0 and side 0 too
I love how, years later these Viruses are making a comeback with GoTeks!
😂
I am curious, how popular are amiga computers today? Are they used for anything other than as a hobby?
Not really used commercial anymore, although you might find the odd one that’s been left doing something. But for hobby, depends what part of the world you’re in. In Europe, really popular with new games, software and hardware coming out all the time, and several (trade) shows to go to, and then there’s the active demo scene too! But around the globe there’s many many different Amiga groups that meet regularly- check out retro.directory see if there’s one near you
Would it be exceedingly difficult to make a capture device that captures the video before it gets converted to RGB?
Not exactly sure what you’re after but there are devices that do this
@@RobSmithDev It just seems weird to wait until after the video is sent through a DAC to convert it to HDMI. I assume by RGB you mean wither CGA/EGA/VGA or SCART.
I have 2 ext disk drive with a antivirus switch guessing it works the same way
It might, but it may also block the WRITE GATE line, if it does then they’re safe
Elite on Acorn Electron
Where can i buy one lol
So you say people use GoTechs now and viruses are back. Why doesn't the GoTech have equivalent functionality? And by that I mean implemented more correctly such that truly only sectors 0 and 1 are protected and they are properly protected instead of just flagged as unwritable when they really are writable. It could even store the writes to sectors 0 and 1 in a side buffer and make them look like they were written to the host but on its own screen put up a question asking for confirmation if you really want those sectors to be written or not. Of course the functionality would also be selectable, on or off. So you can turn it off when you really want to write a bunch of boot sectors in a row without extra clicks.
Seems like it would be useful.
Also, when explaining the circuitry you go through trouble of explaining open collector active low signals, but you don't explain and of the symbols used other than that. If a person doesn't know about open collector signals they likely don't know what the symbol is for a switch or a diode, or a pull up resistor for that matter. Often it's hard when explaining the basics to people who don't know them to try to remember what the basics are!
Anyway, interesting device and good video.
Interesting comment - I’ll have to contact Kier Fraser (FlashFloppy) and see what he thinks.
It’s always difficult to work out the level of knowledge to provide on these subjects (schematics etc) a difficult balance to be sure!
08:06 Ahh, so I'm guessing the Amiga uses a shared disk bus with all signals present on the connector (even internal ones). That would explain how this could work (I was expecting multiple independent buses to be present or only unused signals to be present on the connector). Edit: 08:53 Is the internal drive's select line in fact not present?
Yes correct. There was no need to make the select 0 line available as it was always connected to the internal drive. This wiring for floppy drives was fairly common, not just on the Amiga - I guess if they’d all been independent it would have added comply and increased cost
@@RobSmithDev Watching this videos made me realize there are a lot details of mid '80s PC hardware design that I'm unaware of. That's especially true of the Amiga which I've had little exposure to. I'm most familiar with the Atari ST/TT and just looked at some Atari ST schematics (only 2 pages!) and found a few surprises. I really should delve into them more deeply (and those for Amiga and Acorn); these simply weren't available back in the day. (Apologies for the tangent.)
There’s some funny comments in the Amiga schematics, one of my favourites is in the Amiga 2000 schematics, there’s an internal serial port connector, but in the schematics it’s got a different name - I’ll let you find that one 😃
@@RobSmithDev LOL :^) A typo too good to fix?
May have been intentional but there’s some silly comments in all of them
5 pounds in 1985 is like $30 USD now...
Makes sense, I think that’s about what you’d pay for a 23 way connector these days!
So no, it doesn't do a thing, other than be another thing to plug in!
the time your only chance to hack someone was social engineering
Before everything was connected, yes
it's still the most effective method. The weakest part of computer security is us users, as much as we may not want to believe it lol
So true
Ironically viruses weren't even a big issue in the Amiga's times. Floppy disks could be write protected and few had a hard disk.
I think it depends where you were and what you were doing. I know they spread around ‘the school playground’ a lot as games were ‘shared’ with friends
lol funny
This device could have achieved a much safer result by deasserting the write gate (input to drive) when track 0 was asserted. Same circuit different pin, much better result.
Unfortunately not possible from the outside - you’d have to hold the pin at 5V and then anything that tried to pull it low would cause a short circuit. You’d be best disconnecting it from the inside
We need this!
Because Amigas run the entire banking system around the world.
No, I was joking, Amigas just play video games.
I've seen them used in cable TV directory systems as well. Was amusing to tune to the local channel guide to see a GURU error. Granted, this was quite a few years back, so they *may* have upgraded by now.
Hey kid wanna buy a cheap flux capacitor. $5, pop the disk in the drive then take Amiga in hand and run down a hill. You be in the wild west before you know it.
😂😂😂
The floppy disks have write protectect on them 😅 this parallel shit is useless
Sure is!
A Brit talking about Amiga? Color me surprised.
The Amiga was wildly popular in Europe.