What is this thing?

[glurk]

So I went thru some old computer stuff I had, and found this thing I guess I made.  It's a male DB-25 that was in a case/shell.  It has four wires attaching some pins.  My first thought was that it was an RS-232 loopback - which I could currently use.  But the connections seem funny??  As best I can tell, the pin connections are:

 

1  <--> 13

10 <--> 16

11 <--> 17

12 <--> 14

 

So what the heck?  Apparently I went to the trouble of making this, and putting it in a shell.  Probably got the parts at Radio Shack long ago.  What is it?  Any ideas?

 

 

[wierd_w]

null modem converter?

[glurk]

1 hour ago, wierd_w said:

null modem converter?

I dunno.  The pinout just seems wrong to me.  I have one for DB-9, it is correct, checked it out.  But this thing, who knows.  I've been searching Google images for pinouts, and can't find this layout.  I'm afraid to plug it into anything as is.  And yet, I (apparently) went to the trouble to solder it up, and put it in a case, like I would get a lot of use from it.  And it was unlabeled, and so I just have no idea!

 

[onlyinajeep]

Parallel ports were DB-25 and often a port of choice for dongle copy protection schemes. The C64 Leaderboard golf one was that simple but PC ones were more sophisticated and usually passthrough.

Edited June 22, 2021 by onlyinajeep

[Reaperman]

On 6/22/2021 at 12:59 PM, onlyinajeep said:

Parallel ports were DB-25 and often a port of choice for dongle copy protection schemes. The C64 Leaderboard golf one was that simple but PC ones were more sophisticated and usually passthrough.

A weird part of my memory just recalled a joystick port attachment that Pa made for the Atari 800 version of Leaderboard Golf. Just a bare nine pin connecter, with a wire or two connected under a lump of clear epoxy. As a kid, I'd assumed it was for single-player play, since it went in controller port two. He always insisted that it was needed, but I never found it necessary as a kid or an adult--so maybe a fully-cracked version found its way into our library at some later time. Anybody remember if this was actually 'a thing'?

[onlyinajeep]

1 hour ago, Reaperman said:

A weird part of my memory just recalled a joystick port attachment that Pa made for the Atari 800 version of Leaderboard Golf. Just a bare nine pin connecter, with a wire or two connected under a lump of clear epoxy. As a kid, I'd assumed it was for single-player play, since it went in controller port two. He always insisted that it was needed, but I never found it necessary as a kid or an adult--so maybe a fully-cracked version found its way into our library at some later time. Anybody remember if this was actually 'a thing'?

The Amiga Leaderboard also had a joystick port security key, probably same one used on the Atari 800 version. IIRC it was just up, down and gnd wired together.

From the Atari 800 Leaderboard manual. 
 

 

[carlsson]

Oddly, the security on the Commodore 64 version of Leaderboard Golf was to keep a key on the datassette pushed down, or use a supplied dongle that went into the cassette port rather than one of the joystick ports. Perhaps the joysticks are wired through the CIA in a such way that it was not recommended to keep a direction pulled down indefinitely long and that is why they used a different scheme?

 

(And no, the C64 does not have any DB-25 connectors natively. There were RS-232 interfaces for the userport that would give it one but not out of the box.)

[bluejay]

Did you happen to own a Toshiba laptop in the 90s-early 2000s? Dongles that look a lot like yours were used to reset BIOS passwords in those laptops. Forgot what pins they were connecting though.