[Coco] [Color Computer] Another flaky question: RAM "snapshot" device

[David Bush]

I have several CoCo programs which, as far as I know,
exist only on my 5.25" floppies: Pyramix, The Source,
Demon Seed, Sinistaar.

I purchased each of these legally. Their copy protection
schemes are in the long run potentially damaging, both
to the diskettes and the diskette drive. Demon Seed in
particular is quite a drive thrasher.

I would like to be able to disassemble and modify these
programs so they can run off my hard drive. To that end,
I have in mind a hardware device which would work as
follows: I load and run the software. While it is
running, I push a button, and the CPU receives a
non-maskable interrupt. The address of the NMI routine
is also changed, so control is transferred to another
program while the copy-protected program is still
sitting in RAM. I could then transfer RAM to a disk file
to examine and disassemble at my leisure.

Does this seem feasible? Is there a simpler solution?
Thanks!

BTW there is a bug in Demon Seed which crops up if you
attain the boss ship level (fifth level) for the second
(or maybe third) time. Sometimes it works, and sometimes
the program crashes the moment the boss level starts.
Does anyone have a patch?