[Coco] Easy way to copy 40 track disks to the CoCoSDC?

[John Riddle]

Regarding Dragon Blade, IIRC that program was written in basic which was
hidden/disguised to appear as a machine language binary.  Somewhere out
there, there is a utility called RESTORE.BIN which you can load and execute
after a CTRL-ALT-RESET, which will restore a basic program into memory.  I
don't remember exactly how it worked.  I will try to locate it if anyone is
interested.  I had removed the protection from this game years ago, back in
the late 90's so that I could play it in Jeff Vavasour's emulator (this was
before the era of Mess and DMK images).  IIRC, my approach was to load the
game, reset the coco, restore the basic program, and save it back.. the
code for accessing the non-standard-format sector (which I think was on
track 34 or 35 and numbered above 18 - there was nothing very special about
the track format, 17 regular sectors and one numbered 99 or something like
that) was written in basic and used the DSKCON routines to load it.  I
can't remember if there was data on that sector that was relevant to the
functionality of the game, or it if just did a check on it.  In any case,
if the data was important, it would have been just a matter of saving
whatever was on that sector back to disk and then patching the basic
program to skip over the oddball sector load and load the saved sector data
instead.

White Fire and HOTK 1-3 were all written in basic too.  All used the
same/similar game engine.

John



>>
>>
> Thank you for that information Darren! I have a disk that refuses to copy
> a specific sector to the SDC and thus don't work at all, but in the
> original disk it works just fine. I'll try to use this "Defeater" to see it
> solves the issue.
> The protected game is one that is not on the Color Archive yet, it's
> called "Dragon Blade"
>
> Daniel
>
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