I used BigMac
for all my projects, including the doomed SSC
ROM... (*1)
[...]
(*1) I don't know if I already told the story
If you have, I've certainly never heard it...
Well, It was around 1982 when a friend of mine designed a
nice combo card for the apple, at his kitchen table (*1),
featuring a 6522 based paralell port, a clock and a SCC
compatible serial port. Since I had way to much time on my
hand, and did love to programm the Apple, I did the DOS and
ProDOS drivers for the clock, and build a 4 system disk,
DOS and ProDOS file system on one side, CP/M and Pascal
on the other... As I said, the Serial part was 100% SSC
compatible, you could just drop in a SSC-ROM to get it
working. Mathias had some concerns to just copy the ROM,
but he wanted to give our future customers something, so
I stared to completly redo the ROM without changeing any
known and used entry point.... part of the work was to
move code around, but it's not that easy. The Code didn't
offer a lot of redundancy, and entry points where scattered
all over - one of the bad featured about well docunented
software, available in source to everyone (the listing was
part of the manual) is that people tend to realy use it.
Sp part of the work was figuring out what official and
otherwise addresses have been used in various software
packets. It took me about a month to redo the ROM. At the
end no codesegment larger than 50 bytes was still the same,
and less than 70 bytes where still at the same location.
Now, when I finaly delivered the ROM I was more than happy.
Mathias went the very next day to Apple Germayn (their HQ
was at this time just on the other end of town), to show
them our card, and he also told them about our full compatible
ROM ... just to learn that they didn't had any objections
against using A STRAIGHT COPY ... Well, it, lets say, took
away a bit of my pride about the new ROM ...
That's the story ...
Gruss
H.
(*1) in fact, this was the start of FAST Electronic, later
one a quite successful venture, with successfull products
from video imageing and high speed digital scopes up to
europes leading copy protection dongle (Hard-Lock) and a
TiVo like digital TV solution - later on Aladdin bought
the Copy Protection parts, and He kept the multi media
devision... but that spanns 20 years from that kitchen
table.
--
VCF Europa 4.0 am 03./04. Mai 2003 in Muenchen
http://www.vcfe.org/
