Re: PET WordCraft tape port dongle

From: Justin Cordesman <shadow_at_darksideresearch.com>
Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2025 12:56:08 -0700
Message-Id: <zarafa.68055158.4848.2221585f17cd9428_at_atlas.darksideresearch.com>
I bet it’s something simple like enough gates for an XOR and I/O loopback.

Justin

> On Apr 20, 2025, at 14:10, Didier Derny <didier@aida.org> wrote:
> 
> no way to find a working workcraft with it's dongle ?
> 
> and put a logic analyser to analyse the transfers ?
> 
> 
> then eventually reproduce the dongle with a small fpga to understand how the system works ?
> 
> 
> 
>> Le 20/04/2025 à 20:22, Rhialto a écrit :
>>> On Sun 20 Apr 2025 at 09:57:23 -0400, Craig Taylor wrote:
>>> See: http://bitbarn.co.uk/dryfire/dcpe.php#pets for how to emulate.
>> Interesting find! Especially the link near the end
>> http://bitbarn.co.uk/dryfire/dcpe.zip which contains some code to run on
>> the hardware from the page. It doesn't seem to be 100% complete
>> though, since the implementation of "dongle = shiftIn(dataIn, clockIn,
>> LSBFIRST);" seems to be missing.
>> 
>> An interesting discrepancy is that the text mentions an 8-bit shift
>> register, and the WordCraft code shifts 15 bits in (and MSB, not LSB
>> first). This would fit better with the serial numbers, for instance one
>> instance of WordCraft claims it is serial number 16105.
>> 
>> WordCraft also reads from both tape ports in parallel. I'm not sure if 2
>> dongles are required, or if it simply accepts a dongle in either
>> position.
>> 
>> So I have made an emulation of something, but it doesn't convince
>> WordCraft yet.
>> 
>>>> On Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 9:35?AM David Roberts <daver21145@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Do we need to warm up the cracking tools again?!
>>>> 
>>>> Dave
>>>> 
>>>> On Sun, 20 Apr 2025, 13:46 Rhialto, <rhialto@falu.nl> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> Hi all. I was looking into the PET version of WordCraft. It is one of
>>>>> the fairly few programs that uses the 8096 memory expansion. But it is
>>>>> protected with a dongle on the tape port, and I did not come across any
>>>>> cracked versions.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Does anybody know how to emulate the dongle? Or have one? Or have a
>>>>> cracked version of WordCraft?
>>>>> 
>>>>> After startup, WordCraft appears to work, and you get into command mode.
>>>>> However no command actually works, and when trying to get into editing
>>>>> mode (STOP key), it executes a JAM instruction.
>>>>> 
>>>>> So far I found out that you get to the "interesting" part of the code if
>>>>> you set a read breakpoint on E811. The code being executed is
>>>>> "encrypted" in the file as loaded from disk. It gets decrypted before it
>>>>> is run, and re-encrypted afterwards. I haven't found a trivial way to
>>>>> disarm it yet.
>>>>> 
>>>>> There is a ROM on zimmers.net that suggests it is for use with
>>>>> WordCraft, but if so, it's not the protection part, since installing it
>>>>> does't seem to make a difference (although according to Vice, it does
>>>>> read from the $9xxx area several times).
>>>>> 
>>>>> -Olaf.
>>>>> --
>>>>> ___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert                            <rhialto/at/falu.nl
>>>>> \X/ There is no AI. There is just someone else's work.           --I. Rose
>>>>> 
> 
Received on 2025-04-20 22:00:01

Archive generated by hypermail 2.4.0.