Questions about Central Point Deluxe Option board

From: Joe <rigdonj_at_cfl.rr.com>
Date: Wed Jun 26 19:50:03 2002

Jeff,

   I used to have one of these so I'll try to answer your questions as best as I can remember. It goes between the regular disk controller and the floppy drives. I *believe* you remove the cable from the existing disk controller and plug it into the card edge connector on the Option card (that preserves any cable twists and drive addresssing) and then installed a supplied cable between the edge connector of the existing controller and the row of pins on the Option board. Yes, it can handle two drives. In fact, IIRC it will handle four drives if your system can handle four drives on a single cable. It does NOTHING during normal system operation. But when you run the Central Point SW it completely takes over control of the drives and copies (or edits) ANYTHING on the disk that the drive can physically access including all the stuff that MS-DOS and standard drive controllers can't access. You can access 40+ tracks (as many as 43 depending on the drive) and you can copy, access, edit the address blocks, CRC blo
cks, etc etc. It can even simulate a laser burned spot or weakly magnetized sectors on a disk. Both of these were commonly used anti-disk copying gimmicks. I never found a copy protected disk that I couldn't duplicate with the Option card. I wish I''d keep mine.

    Joe

At 06:17 PM 6/26/02 -0400, you wrote:
>
>
>Central Point Deluxe Option board: I don't recall how this card is
>supposed to interface with the disks. There is a card edge connector
>and a row of pins on the board. Does the board go inbetween the FDC and
>drives, or does it replace the floppy controller entirely? Any special
>cabling required, and can it run two drives?
>
>Thanks,
>Jeff
>
>
>
Received on Wed Jun 26 2002 - 19:50:03 BST