[Coco] Found out what that "Mystery Hardware" is

[Arthur Flexser]

Huh, I was going to guess it was Master Key, but was so uncertain, never
having seen one, that I refrained!  It wasn't exactly a cartridge copying
utility, if I'm remembering correctly, but rather a method for interrupting
a running program at any point as an aid to defeating its copy protection.
Another of Computize's products was Spit N Image, a protected disk copying
utility.  I think the button on the top of the cartridge probably caused an
NMI (non-maskable interrupt) in order to stop execution and jump to some
code in the rompak that perhaps disassembled the target program at the
interruption point and allowed the flow of execution to be traced.

Art


On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 11:46 PM, Glen VanDenBiggelaar <glenvdb at hotmail.com>
wrote:

> I found out what that mystery hardware cart is by actually plugging it in.
> For those that are interested, it's a "Master Key 2" cart by computize. I
> have never seen one before, and by doing a quick Google search, it looks
> like a Cartridge copying utility.
>
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