Richard wrote: > VisiCalc for the CBM 8032 was protected by a custom PROM you placed > into one of the empty sockets on the motherboard. True. I suppose it mattered how big the market was, and the amount of work required to install something like that. Back then I presume almost all machines were under warranty or at least service contracts, which should mean only qualified technicians would be trusted to install custom ROMs. Even though it would be a one time operation, sales would be more complicated than just shipping some floppy disks and books. Actually I've seen one or two dongles going into the cassette ports too. Perhaps those were more commonly seen on the later C64 but they seem to have existed on the PET side as well. In theory I suppose someone could plug a device into the userport or even IEEE to act like a copy protection dongle or supply additional routines, it was only a matter of development and production costs. The cartridge boards for the CBM-II series and of course Commodore's home computers may have been the cheapest form of additional hardware to produce. By the way, I have sent and donated a small bunch of CBM-II series cartridge boards to people who can have use of them, i.e. producing own software. I may still have a bunch of boards. Contact me privately if anyone else is in need of those. Currently there are few or no known applications making use of a cartridge other than a dongle, but I could be wrong. These boards at least take one or two 2764 EPROMs each. Best regards -- Anders Carlsson Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing listReceived on 2009-12-02 09:00:04
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