MikeSilva

I'm going to disappoint you by tossing the "I don't remember" card now. For example, I don't even remember if I was aware of the difference in motor speeds between Atari and standard drives (!), but we certainly didn't change the speed of the drives. And I don't remember anything about handling the index pulses, sorry! I just remember that it all worked.

No, the drives were not Atari, just regular IDE drives, lined up on their sides. And I'm not aware that they ever duped disks for any other companies. Mike

(well I STILL can't make the "quote" reply feature work in this forum - crazy!!) Anyway, about the board, I'm sure they're all in landfill somewhere in Marin County, where Broderbund was located. I don't remember how many they made, maybe 6 to 10? Anyway, just imagine the PCB of a standard cartridge, but on the top the board grows out to maybe 14" wide and 10" high (35x25 cm). Lots of 2102 memory chips, enough to hold all the possible transitions in a single track - I just did a really rough calculation now and I come up with maybe 60 2102 memory chips, assuming 18 sectors * 200 total bytes/sector * 8 bits/byte * 2 transitions/bit. ​

Well, it pleases me to hear that my board was able to produce some of the very best copy protection of the era! I never knew that. Mike

ijor, I know something about it, but not everything. I was originally hired at Synapse to do hardware - specifically, a multi-disk duplicator. The design I came up with could switch on a per-track basis between a standard floppy disk controller (WD-1793, as I remember), and raw bitmapped data. That is, you could write any sequence of bits you chose onto the track - at a few different clock rates too, IIRC. Of course it had to be readable by standard drives, but it gave us huge flexibility later on for copy protection. The board plugged into an Atari 800 cartridge slot (towering about a foot above the computer) and the duplication software ran on the Atari. It could duplicate 8 floppies at a time IIRC. It was used for all subsequent disk duplication at Synapse, and was even moved over to Broderbund and used for their stuff. As the copy protection wars heated up, Synapse hired a full-time programmer named Larry ??? just to do copy protection schemes, using the board. I'm sure he made good use of the raw bitmap track capability, but I don't know any of the details. Mike

You guys are making me think I need to go into witness protection... Just kidding!

I was the one taking the picture...

I don't know. Maybe they weren't selling well as more people bought disk drives, and it was an inventory adjustment thing. Just like all those Atari cartridges buried in landfills.

Found this picture and thought the group might enjoy it. Sometime in 1982/83 we were all invited to stick around after work to smash cassettes in exchange for pizza and beer. Here are the results.

Once again I thought I was responding to some quoted text, and ended up posting a blank message. Sigh...........

Is Part 4 coming? -- Never mind, I see it on youtube. More thanks! Mike

Yeah, it is really amazing how much smaller caps are today then 30 years ago, not to mention 50 or 75 years ago. People who restore old radios and TVs routinely pull out the innards of bad caps and stuff much smaller modern caps inside, thus keeping the original appearance.

Great stuff, JAC! It's like rummaging through my grandparents' attic. I guarantee you that that area filled with $09 is the column width array, but beyond that, I'm just going to sit back now and enjoy the fun. Mike

Hmm, I grabbed the latest4.6 install and when I tried to run it it just twinkled at me and nothing happened. I'll try again. I did interview with Kevin. He's the one who tracked me down and got all this started. BTW, to no-one in particular, I'm growing more and more impressed with Altirra.

(man, I do NOT understand how the quote-reply works on this forum software!). OK, I'm now able to save files to the pseudo-disk. Thanks again. I can then view them with a standard binary data viewer. Is there such a viewer built into Altirra as well?