And in the advertisements that the…

And in the advertisements that the company places in magazines for Atari enthusiasts, it reminds customers to respect Atari’s trademarks.
And the firm has its own worries about pirates: it has erased the serial number of all the chips in the device.
But at least one British pirate, who works as a computer engineer, is putting the problem of identifying them to his employer’s IBM, which is normally employed in designing circuits. In a couple of months.
Happy Computing could have its own problem with pirates.
The cat-and-mouse world of copying
EVERY type of home computer and data storage system has its own method of copying.
Here, we describe how pirates working on Atari 400 and 800 computers with disc drives deal with the company’s “copyguards”. ROM cartridges.
These are programs written on read-only memory chips.
To copy them and the pirate has to feed the program into the computer’s memory and then read it back onto a disc.
Atari makes it more difficult by writing into the operating system (the instructions that govern how the computer handles data) an instruction that does not allow the computer to talk to disc drive and cartridge at the same time.
Enthusiasts can overcome this by ramming the cartridge into its socket while the drive is running. But this is unreliable, and can cause the machine to crash.
A much more elegant method is to re-program the computer’s operating system to remove the safeguard. However only skilled programmers can do this.
One group of pirates has made a small add-on circuit board which makes it easier to copy ROM cartridges. It sells for £90 ” only to trusted friends.
Once the pirate has the program on the disc, he can transfer it onto a blank chip via an EPROM programmer. Standard disc drive: This used to be the easiest data story to copy.
All the pirate had to do was to read the source (original) disc into the computer’s memory and replace the source disc with a blank one, and write the program back on it. Computer firms soon introduced copyguarding measures to stop pirates doing this. The most common defence is the “unreadable” sector.
Each disc consists of 40 tracks, each of which contains 18 sectors. Each sector can hold 128 bytes of data.
The drive reads these sectors, and feeds them to the computer.
If the sector contains information, it goes to the computer, if it is blank the message is a series of zeros. An unreadable sector sends the message “I cannot read that”.

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