[Coco] Found out what that "Mystery Hardware" is

[Arthur Flexser]

I'm guessing that the rompak plugged into the CoCo and the disk controller
plugged into the rompak's ribbon cable, to allow the use of Master Key with
disk-based programs.  The presence of the rompak would be invisible to the
target program until the button was pressed.

Art


On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 12:38 AM, Glen VanDenBiggelaar <glenvdb at hotmail.com>
wrote:

> thanks for the info Art.
> for those that want a screen shot:
> http://amigalounge.com/images/006.jpg
>
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >Huh, I was going to guess it was Master Key, but was so uncertain, never
> >having seen one, that I refrained! It wasn't exactly a cartridge copying
> >utility, if I'm remembering correctly, but rather a method for
> interrupting
> >a running program at any point as an aid to defeating its copy protection.
> >Another of Computize's products was Spit N Image, a protected disk copying
> >utility. I think the button on the top of the cartridge probably caused an
> >NMI (non-maskable interrupt) in order to stop execution and jump to some
> >code in the rompak that perhaps disassembled the target program at the
> >interruption point and allowed the flow of execution to be traced.
>
> >Art
>
>
>
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