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What the hell is this thing?


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So I picked up a CIB Commodore 64,CIB disk drive,and CIB printer at a yard sale today for a price that will make you angry. ;)
Anyway It all looks so new I thought it was never used but then I saw this thing sticking out of the cart slot. After some intense googling I am coming up with nothing. When its in the slot and I turn on the 64 it says Express ready.
Could this be some kind of third party ram expansion or something?
s03uq.jpgx4rc.jpg

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Definitly a standard ROM cart with EPROM support. You could probably burn some cart ROM onto EPROM and use it on a real C64.

 

If you do have EPROM programmer, see if you can dump it and post it? The whiz could probably compare to known ROM list to see if it's a form of fast load, DOS wedges, or newer or custom BASIC or something.

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  • 1 year later...

That is an add-on to a copy protection software package from "Ball Brothers" that allowed direct control of the floppy controller to bypass the 1541 drive's controller to write to non-standard sectors. Quite useful, in it's day.

 

Express Ready was the wording used to show it was recognized. It seems the Ball Brothers marketed it as a drive "accelerator", but those in the know, knew it meant so much more.

 

Oddly, that Ball Brothers software, company, remnants of a company, have all disappeared but for the memory of a few. It was THE best copy utility, bar none. From manual parameter inclusion, non-standard sector writes/reads, and even simulating a non-readable sector (the original had a laser burnt area that could be written, but should not be correctly read, which Ball Brothers s/w h/w combo would simulate, while others (me) simply (well simply mixed with accuracy) poked with a pin.

 

Having that s/w h/w combo meant owning ALL C64 software.

 

I purchased that exact combo from the back pages of a Compute's Gazette so long ago, it's like trying to remember the names of my friends in kindergarten.

Edited by markchm
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That is an add-on to a copy protection software package from "Ball Brothers" that allowed direct control of the floppy controller to bypass the 1541 drive's controller to write to non-standard sectors. Quite useful, in it's day.

 

Express Ready was the wording used to show it was recognized. It seems the Ball Brothers marketed it as a drive "accelerator", but those in the know, knew it meant so much more.

 

Oddly, that Ball Brothers software, company, remnants of a company, have all disappeared but for the memory of a few. It was THE best copy utility, bar none. From manual parameter inclusion, non-standard sector writes/reads, and even simulating a non-readable sector (the original had a laser burnt area that could be written, but should not be correctly read, which Ball Brothers s/w h/w combo would simulate, while others (me) simply (well simply mixed with accuracy) poked with a pin.

 

Having that s/w h/w combo meant owning ALL C64 software.

 

I purchased that exact combo from the back pages of a Compute's Gazette so long ago, it's like trying to remember the names of my friends in kindergarten.

Is this perhaps the software you are referring to? http://csdb.dk/release/?id=88453

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  • 2 weeks later...

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