3 ms·
The "Copy II PC Option Board", yeah. I knew a guy who had one, and it definitely could handle a lot of stuff that you normally couldn't. Interestingly, you real
by Firehawke 6y ago
The "Copy II PC Option Board", yeah. I knew a guy who had one, and it definitely could handle a lot of stuff that you normally couldn't. Interestingly, you really wanted an early-era board because they were forced to water down the later revisions so they couldn't copy newer protection schemes.
- h2odragon 6y agoThe original company got bought out by Central Point, they'd been running for a bit before then. They were not quite totally opaque in "API" then, there were like maybe 3 asm examples floating around BBS and net.* era usenet.
- dunham 6y agoMy fuzzy recollection is that the option board could read the entire track at once, raw - not MFM decoded, where the typical controller in a PC had a high level interface that only gave you sectors. One copy protection system that I remember was a track that had a mix of long and short sectors with the short sectors embedded in the middle of the longer ones. (Sectors header/footers were marked by special bytes that were illegal MFM coding.) If a program tried to copy the the track with a normal floppy controller, they would have more sectors than would fit on a track.