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Slightly off topic: One day in the late 90s or early 2000s, I wanted to transfer the contents of my Atari 8-bit disks to my PC. I did know about SIO2PC, a cable
by cyco130 3y ago
Slightly off topic: One day in the late 90s or early 2000s, I wanted to transfer the contents of my Atari 8-bit disks to my PC. I did know about SIO2PC, a cable that converts between Atari's SIO port and the PC's serial port and a piece of software to go with it. But I didn't have the electronics skills to build one (even though it is actually very easy).
So I ended up writing a Basic program on the Atari to read data from the disk sector by sector and paint it on the screen (with the large 4-color pixels of graphics mode 3). The Atari was connected to the TV card of my PC and a Delphi program I wrote was running on the PC that kept taking screen shots and trying to decode the data from there. I quickly learned that empty sectors threw off my pixel position calibration so I added a mask pattern and a checksum. The sector address was also included. With that, I was able to transfer all my disk contents to my PC. To this day I consider it my greatest engineering achievement :)
Some ten years later, I went on to build an SIO2PC program called AspeQt. A more up-to-date community fork called RespeQt is still the most popular tool in that category used by the community. It even has its own subforum on AtariAge[1].
[1] https://forums.atariage.com/forum/184-respeqt-sio2pc-software/ https://forums.atariage.com/forum/184-respeqt-sio2pc-softwar...
- efdee 3y agoJust wanted to say this sounds like a fun project and you must have been pretty happy when it ended up working out!
- cyco130 3y agoI was so happy that I'm still boasting about it some 25 years later!
- xnx 3y agoI think there's definitely a future for this type of data exfiltration via display as otherwise locked-down systems become more common.
- spiritplumber 3y agohttps://www.robots-everywhere.com/re_wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.AudioSerial https://www.robots-everywhere.com/re_wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.... I gotta fix my wiki.... https://www.robots-everywhere.com/re_wiki/images/Derpserial.png https://www.robots-everywhere.com/re_wiki/images/Derpserial....
- blakesmith 3y agoReminds me of how the first generation iPod firmware and keys were reverse engineered. They blinked out bit patterns on the LCD backlight and used a camera to read the data in! https://mastodon.social/@bagder/111538350617290554 https://mastodon.social/@bagder/111538350617290554
- nayuki 3y agoCitation needed, but I think I read that hackers dumped the firmware of Canon cameras by blinking the single red LED on the camera (and foregoing the main graphical LCD). See the CHDK and Magic Lantern projects.
- aksss 3y agoThat's definitely worthy of praise. Excellent work. How old were you at the time?