vmr@psuhcx.psu.edu (Victor M. Ricker) (01/12/90)
Oh Chuck, what a God you are! Even little kids can crack protection anymore. All that aside, what's the most interesting program you've cracked/attempted? Back when I had a Tandy Coco3 there was a disk that did some really wacky stuff. It had a very tiny loader program ( < $80 bytes). It would jump into the disk io buffer and start executing some code that was left there from the end of the directory track. That read a few hidden sectors that had the main loader code. That code would read some "wacky format" tracks and use the disk status register and a magic "fudge-factor" to index into a table of sectors to be read from the disk and what order. It had its own IRQ/FIRQ and NMI routines that screwed with the timing that caused the bad sectors to read correctly. Ever copy ROM cartridges?? -Vic Ricker vmr@hcx.psu.edu