Just won coco MicroSD Pak

[jhd]

As I recall, some Coco games PAKs had an ingenious copy protection mechanism -- they would attempt to overwrite their own code. Because the game was in ROM, this would have no effect, but if the game was was run from RAM, then it would self-destruct.

 

Unfortunately, I don't recall which titles those were. I don't think there were that many, as I was easily able to run most of the games from cassette (I never did have a disk system for the Coco).

[aaronwolfe]

As I recall, some Coco games PAKs had an ingenious copy protection mechanism -- they would attempt to overwrite their own code. Because the game was in ROM, this would have no effect, but if the game was was run from RAM, then it would self-destruct.

 

Unfortunately, I don't recall which titles those were. I don't think there were that many, as I was easily able to run most of the games from cassette (I never did have a disk system for the Coco).

 

Yep, many of the ROM Paks try writing to themselves as a simple form of copy protection. If that is all they do, they'll probably work fine in one of the SuperIDE's rom banks, as they are read only from the coco's perspective (unless you are running the special flashing software). Some paks went a step further and have bank switching or some other logic behind their address space, those cannot be used with anything that just presents static values like rom/ram/flash. The code has to be changed not to do that kind of thing. I think the more popular paks have been modified to work from disk, if you hunt around on the web.

[jhd]

Do you know which Paks used bank switching? This is the very first I've ever heard of that technique being used on the Coco. I always thought that it was just the basic 8K of memory, mapped to the cartridge space.

[aaronwolfe]

Do you know which Paks used bank switching? This is the very first I've ever heard of that technique being used on the Coco. I always thought that it was just the basic 8K of memory, mapped to the cartridge space.

 

I do not know all of them, but it is mostly the later and/or coco 3 only rompaks. Super Pitfall, Thexder, and Robocop are some I believe.

[blakespot]

I have two of these SD Card Drive Paks made by R. Taylor and I'm trying to get new files installed on the SD. On the FB group I was told the SD card is std FAT32 and can be mounted to Windows and .BIN, etc. just copied over. I can't get Windows or macOS to recognize either of the Paks' SD cards. 

 

What is the process of getting a new .BIN installed on a "volume" on the SD card? I am trying to run Twilight Terminal, which is not on the bundled software (that I can see). Many thanks.