Re: WildCard By Central Point Question

[Andy McFadden <fadden@fadden.com>]

Bryan Villados <news002@macgeek.org> wrote:
> From my recollection of using this card, 100-percent of the program you're
> copying needs to be resident in RAM. For example, Castle Wolfenstein
> constantly read the diskette throughout the play, so WildCard won't copy it
> completely. Games like Hard Hat Mack and other single-loading stuff can be
> copied just fine. Once you have the program cracked to a diskette,
> theoretically you can clean up the code, bleeping out all the unused and
> unnecessary stuff, and save the program into a single binary file so you can
> just BRUN it instead of booting off the disk.

Some single-load programs that won't work include EDD, Frogger, and Maze
Craze Construction Set.  The latter two use the "uncopyable" Spiradisc,
which is nearly impossible to copy with a nibble copier, and includes a
system scan to keep you from running the image on anything but an identical
machine.  (See COMPUTIST #52 (??) for a crack.)

EDD trashed its own stack pointer whenever it was waiting for input, so
the bytes pushed onto the stack by the interrupt would corrupt the return
address on the stack.  You had to hit the NMI button while it was "moving"
to get a clean copy.

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