10 replies to this topic

[walter_J64bit]

Any one here have a good cart copy program?

[carmel_andrews]

There are various 'software only' solutions like the ones from gardiner computing's 'piracy disks', the various pd offerings, scanalyser, etc etc however, these all fail at the cartridge mem. protection end of things

there are two solutions, if you have a real atari and know a bit of how to hack cart data and loader and the protection sys. to disk and also a bit of 6502 coding knowledge might help here, then get your hands on omnimon or Ultimon or qmeg (built in m/c monitor/debuggers and meomory editors, with limited disk reading/writing ability)

The other possibility is the infamous 'Pill' and impersonator, both programs claim to reverse enginner cartridge data to other writable media... however these programmes are limited to certain types of 16k carts (and won't do all of them) again something tro do with the cartridge mem. protection end of things and overwriting different areas of memory (which is why you'll never be able to hack the cart version of 'thunderfox' to disk as the program itself is over 16k long, uses the xegs cart mem. banking technology in addition to the fact that it also uses the normal xl/xe bank switching technique as well, and is coded slightly differently

[ijor]

carmel_andrews, on Mon Aug 15, 2005 8:43 AM, said:

The other possibility is the infamous 'Pill' and impersonator, both programs claim to reverse enginner cartridge data to other writable media... however these programmes are limited to certain types of 16k carts (and won't do all of them)

Hmm. Which conventional cartridges defeat the Pill? AFAIK, the Pill and similar products work for all conventional cartridges (no bank switch, no pass-through, etc).

[Joe Stella]

or..

Old school method - while booting DOS, jam the cart into the slot, then dump the cartridge memory to disk.

Assuming you get the timing right, you'll still need to deal with any cart protection routines yourself.

but hey, it's free.

[carmel_andrews]

ijor, on Mon Aug 15, 2005 5:53 PM, said:

carmel_andrews, on Mon Aug 15, 2005 8:43 AM, said:

The other possibility is the infamous 'Pill' and impersonator, both programs claim to reverse enginner cartridge data to other writable media... however these programmes are limited to certain types of 16k carts (and won't do all of them)

Hmm. Which conventional cartridges defeat the Pill? AFAIK, the Pill and similar products work for all conventional cartridges (no bank switch, no pass-through, etc).

You forgot something ijor... cartridge protection systems which either defeats the pill or supercedes the pill, for instance cartridges that writes to ram (outside 8000-bfff) cartridges that scramble their data, cartridges the fill ram etc and other protection systems

As for stella's idea... does work, but only with sub 32k programs, and i've never seen i work with spartados, and works only for a few programmes

[Plastron]

OK there was a way to do this with an Atari 800 which involved you using the second cartridge slot to dump the memory. You then had a blank cartridge that you plug in which fools the system. i have one in the loft somewhere

[ijor]

carmel_andrews, on Wed Sep 21, 2005 7:32 AM, said:

ijor, on Mon Aug 15, 2005 5:53 PM, said:

carmel_andrews, on Mon Aug 15, 2005 8:43 AM, said:

The other possibility is the infamous 'Pill' and impersonator, both programs claim to reverse enginner cartridge data to other writable media... however these programmes are limited to certain types of 16k carts (and won't do all of them)

Hmm. Which conventional cartridges defeat the Pill? AFAIK, the Pill and similar products work for all conventional cartridges (no bank switch, no pass-through, etc).

You forgot something ijor... cartridge protection systems which either defeats the pill or supercedes the pill, for instance cartridges that writes to ram (outside 8000-bfff) cartridges that scramble their data, cartridges the fill ram etc and other protection systems

Hmm. I don't see how any of those protections could defeat the Pill. May be you don't know (or you misunderstand) how the Pill works? Again, can you name one simple (no bank switching) cartridge that defeats the Pill?

[Rybags]

I copied heaps of carts with my 800XL.

I just wrote a small routine that disabled VBLANK and copied $8000-$BFFF to RAM. You have to disable VBIs because the XL/XE checks to see if a cartridge change has occurred and either reboots or sets a flag to reboot, then locks up (depends on OS version).

Then, save the file and load it up into a disassembler and find/remove any "self-destruct" code. Some cartridges just had a simple loop which wrote 0s to a section of the ROM. Others had more complex methods.

I wrote a special loader which allowed RAM-based carts to resume after reset. You have to keep a copy of the top 1K near $BFFF because it gets erased by the screen opening on a warmstart.

[carmel_andrews]

Rybags, on Thu Oct 6, 2005 1:10 PM, said:

I copied heaps of carts with my 800XL.

I just wrote a small routine that disabled VBLANK and copied $8000-$BFFF to RAM.  You have to disable VBIs because the XL/XE checks to see if a cartridge change has occurred and either reboots or sets a flag to reboot, then locks up (depends on OS version).

Then, save the file and load it up into a disassembler and find/remove any "self-destruct" code.  Some cartridges just had a simple loop which wrote 0s to a section of the ROM.  Others had more complex methods.

I wrote a special loader which allowed RAM-based carts to resume after reset.  You have to keep a copy of the top 1K near $BFFF because it gets erased by the screen opening on a warmstart.

are you going to put your cart's online and also the techniques and programmes used (rybags)

[Rybags]

No point putting my copies online. They're all available elsewhere as .ATR or .EXEs anyway.

Plus with emulator software it's easy to dump or mod ROM images.

[Rybags]

I just uploaded this program to my PC today after finally building an APE cable.

It is a BASIC+Asm program which I wrote for copying files and cartridges. Use the ENTER command to load it.

The file copier is nothing special but the program has a binary file examiner and copies cartridges.

It should work on any 8-bit machine. When copying a cartridge, insert the cartridge when prompted then press a key. The screen colour should change a second or 2 later. When this happens, remove the cartridge and press another key.

The cartridge can then be saved. It will be a DOS Binary Load file with the proper Init and Run addresses. It will copy 4-16K non-banked cartridges fine. Bank select cartridges will not copy with this program.

Also, if the cartridge uses self-destructing code (which many do) then when run it will overwrite itself and the machine will crash.

If the cartridge actually does run, it won't survive a System Reset, as it doesn't have code in the loader to restore the top 1K that gets overwritten by the screen.

Attached Files

•  filecopy.txt   3.58K   53 downloads

Edited by Rybags, Sun Oct 9, 2005 6:20 AM.