Mr. Turbofreezer

This mod most likely is for the software based "Freezer" that was made around 1987/88 or so by a Mr. Frank Malisch of Germany. Name of this "Freezer" was something like "Replay" (IIRC, could be wrong) and it was just some wire, a switch, and a floppy disk. So it was much cheaper than my hardware based "Turbo Freezer" and the school kids could afford it better. Actually, I helped Frank with the design of hardware concept and the 1050 TURBOs which produced the unbreakable copy protection he did use. This software freezer works by keeping the freezer software in the RAM behind the OS ROM and when the switch is flicked and an interrupt occurs then the freezer software is able to take over the machine. The truly ingenious part follows - reconstruction of the unreadable hardware registers of ANTIC, GTIA and POKEY by the freezer software only. Some of that was automatic, some required user inputs based on observations and listening to the sounds. This took a while and was not straightforward. Had a learning curve. But it generated a bootable floppy disk and if all you wanted was to make one of those to defeat some copy protection of a game, then Frank's software freezer was the cheapest route to have it. As for the copy protection of his freezer disk, it was never broken and even professional duplication machines couldn't copy it. Years later, some interested third party wanted to buy the rights to the software freezer - but even Frank, who created it, could not remove the copy protection. It was so much intrinsic to the freezer code that even with the source code it could not be cracked. So Frank could not sell the rights to that third party. Needless to say, the software freezer disks now are very rare and very hard to find. - Bernhard Engl