22 Sep
2001
22 Sep
'01
8:43 a.m.
Hi,
I recently acquired a couple of Central Point Deluxe Option Boards with v5.4
of the software, plus manuals. (I haven't tested either card yet though.)
This card allows protected and wierd-format disks to be read and written using
a standard PC floppy drive. The supplied software supports Mac and Amiga
disks as well as Apple II and Commodore. I guess the hardware is functionally
similar to the Catweasel ISA card.
Anyway, relating to that a few points:
- If anyone needs disk images of the software (3?" 720K or 5?" 360K), I can
upload them. My disks have not been written to since new.
- What was the last version of the software? I read a newsgroup posting from
1997 that mentioned versions 5.5 and 6.0.
- What differences are there between the Option Board and Deluxe Option
Board? Looking at a picture in an eBay auction listing, the Option Board
card appears to use quite a few discrete (TTL?) ICs, whereas the Deluxe
card (or at least, the cards I have), uses an ASIC made by Toshiba. Does
the ASIC simply replicate the discrete ICs, or contain extra functionality?
- Has anyone reverse-engineered the hardware? Only the discrete-IC version
would be feasible, I guess. In combination with disassembling the software,
that should provide sufficient info to allow new software that accesses the
Option Board to be written.
- Has anyone reverse-engineered the disk image file format used by the
software? I know someone has written a program to convert image files
created from Apple II disks to plain disk images for use with Apple
emulators; see http://www.ece.nwu.edu/~cbachmann/apple.html
There is a description of some of the file format on that page.
- Ideally, I'd like to contact someone who was involved with the development
of either the hardware or software; maybe they could provide info on how it
works.
- On a similar note, what was the last version of Central Point's Copy II PC
software? That program could be used to copy some protected PC disks
without needing extra hardware.
-- Mark