Would anyone be interested in one? I'm thinking of selling mine off and using the money to get other retro gear.
Picture:
http://sdrv.ms/KXlsCd
I would be interested if the price is right. What are you asking?
Trading is not allowed on this forum. Captains orders 😜
trading aside, what can you do with it? copy protected disks? I am just curious
wrote:trading aside, what can you do with it? copy protected disks? I am just curious
Yep. That's generally what it's used for. It duplicates the custom formats used by software companies to defeat pirates. A standard floppy drive cannot do a straight up copy of these custom formats without help.
I wish someone would duplicate the duplicator
Sorry, I didn't know trading wasn't allowed. Is there a trading-specific forum?
^ amibay , vintage computer forums... vcf might move this card faster IMHO
Were there many PC games that came on disks with custom formats? I've never come across one.
I know that was fairly common on the Amiga but the floppy controller on those was much more flexible than the controller on PCs.
If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble.
Well, most protections relies on custom formats, rembember that with standard FDC you may:
- Let some tracks unofrmatted.
- Use sectors from 256 bytes to 8K (well... almost, you may define a 8K sector, but track length in DD disks is less than 8K).
- Use sectors of different lenghts in the same track.
- Use any sector numbering. That includes start sector numbering from any value (i.e: 0x80, 0x81...), repeat sector number (0,1,2,3,3,4...), "jump" sectors (0,1,3,4,5...) or even "void" sectors (mark a sector as deleted).
Spanish boot games used to have some of those protections. The most important thing is that you'll need (at least) a sector 0 in track 0 side 0 with a lenght of 512 bytes to boot the PC, or some tracks with standard PC format if you need to show some files in DOS.
Also, some of that tricks were used to give disks higher capacities, like formats used in IBM XDF disks, Microsoft DMF disks and those used in 2M.
The only thing that puzzles me is why FDC has a read track command, but don't allow to write an entire track...
I have traveled across the universe and through the years to find Her.
Sometimes going all the way is just a start...
Does this copy Amiga floppies and 800k Mac floppies, like the Kryoflux and Catweasel?
wrote:Does this copy Amiga floppies and 800k Mac floppies, like the Kryoflux and Catweasel?
Not sure about that but I know a while back I got a lot on ebay that had two Spectre GCR carts, a Magic Sac+ cart and a Discovery cart for the Atari ST and the Discovery cart can do Mac format floppies in addition to backing up copy protected Atari ST floppies.
My Deluxe Option Board packaging markets its ability to read 800k GCR Mac disks heavily. While the hardware was likely capable, it was never able to work with 880k Amiga disks. Thinking back, it really isn't a surprise. Amigas could read/write 720k disks without a problem using just software (CrossDOS), while many non-Superdrive Macs could not. Macs were also more popular in the US than the Amiga at the time. the likelihood of getting a Mac disk as a PC user was much higher.
