Mike Harris

If you know then you know. I haven't made a Coleco program in over 30 years or so. That said... If you can't disassemble a 32k program and weed out the protection within 24 hours then... Otherwise I highly suggest that someone grab an old 286 from one of these recycle drop off points and copy the disks. As far as I am familiar with EOS accessing bad blocks on a disk would mean that you can't use a DDP. And that it would have to directly access the drives emprom to check for bad disks. Then you would have to have a custom disk writer. Just thoughts off the top of my head but it seems like over kill.

The 80 track limitation is just a feature of the adam disk drive and not a copy protection. It is still just a disk. If I were you I would seek out someone with a compatible ADAM drive and get their help grabbing the files because they have sat there for that long a while longer won't hurt. No one is clamoring for Walters Software. Or, if there is no dust or debris inside the disk you can take a chance. Using A REAL dos based computer and a REAL disk drive you can use regular dos commands to copy ADAM disks. I've done it and that is how I transferred all my old software over to my computer before I tossed it all in the trash when I went into the Army. I copied everything including my smartbasic, logo, cpm, EVERYTHING...trust me it does work. This is the problem with you younger generation who pick up my old toys. The ADAM was cool in the day but most people gravitated to the C64 but I was at the beginning. Feel free to ask questions.

Running ADAM Desktop in MESS. Mount Cartridge. Says cant find dot matrix printer...continue Ramdisk Tools Boot Tools Looks like it is using mode 2, 40 column mode if I remember my terminology from 30 years ago. Neat, has an about... Rev 1.1 Copywrite 1991 Walters Software Co. Program by James N. Walters. Actually at second glance this isn't 40 column mode. The characters are normal size while mode 2 they are 2 bytes shorter. 256/6 = 40 columns 256/8 is standard that's why you only got 32 in Smartbasic and most other titles. 2001 used mode 2 I believe. I've used it personally as well as 16x16 sprites in my toys. I bet you didn't know that there were 2 other modes which one was a cross between graphics and text but had limitations due to memory transfers and I think was limited to 8 sprites in total.

BTW... All this talk of Copy Protection. Exactly what? I have yet to encounter any copy protection whatsoever in any coleco software. Unless it was hardware based and I am well versed in every byte of that code. My earlier programing days on the Amiga I was programing an ADAM emulator for the A1200 when Tigervision or some outfit that said they owned the Coleco brand back in 95?? asked me to make one for the PC and actually get paid. Instead of making it chip emulator based my version took the OS calls and translated them to code that ran on the Amiga because an 020 was just too slow to do screen updates. Anyway, long story rant... Outside of an eprom there is no such thing as a copyprotected program on an ADAM. I can copy anything just by using CPM with an assembly language copier I wrote way back. And even that includes the eprom. That's how I backed up all my cartridges long before the hackers guide to the ADAM even surfaced.

I know I am late to the conversation but back when I bartered for my first ADAM 1983? ish. I also bought Defender and of course it did not work. However I later bought a pile of disks along with an original ADAM programing manual labeled top secret 1984 coleco which I still have. This was some insider who upgraded to an Amiga and wanted to get rid of all his ADAM stuff. Anyway, one of the disks had a version Defender that ran on the standalone ADAM. I know because I played the thing every day. Now, could it be a cartridge thing? A patched version or a revision 80 deal? I have no way of testing because these days I just use an emulator.

What a great idea... Then once it is in memory anyone can copy the rom from there just like the old days. The only way this would work is a brand new coleco system. For starters make sure this doesn't run on an ADAM because in 5 seconds of booting CPM I can copy any memory location along with VRAM.

Awesome. Just the thing I was looking for. Is there any way to make sure that this file stay in the emulator folder. I'm just one of those who loves to keep things simple.

I love the simplicity of drag and drop. It just works without all the nonsense. But then again... I tried Smart Logo and the keyboard is not mapped and I see no way of remapping keys. I use a PC under Windows 10. That said..I mean come on... Backspace is to actually backspace and not reset. It would be nice to have the setting stay set. I love the idea of emulating reality but turbo mode on loading should be a definite yes or no and stay that way. At present I am developing an all in one toolbox using VS2017. The end result is a complete graphical environment that will compile a usable rom for an original Colecovision and a Supergame Generator up to 256k Datapack for the ADAM. Of course it is all wish list and I am making some headway. I've got MESS to use for testing purposes but hopefully you will continue the work because yours is ease of use with little overhead.