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From: brianw@microsoft.UUCP (Brian WILLOUGHBY)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Pirating Hardware (was: Re- The Old Octo-RAM car)
Message-ID: <70391@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 1 Feb 91 19:42:25 GMT
References: <9101231720.AA18200@apple.com> <43029@ut-emx.uucp>
Reply-To: brianw@microsoft.UUCP (Brian WILLOUGHBY)
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 74

>(Rick Ewing) writes:
>>BTW, how can you pirate *hardware*???
>
>You can't! That's why I had the smileys! It's mostly a semi-joke about how
>whenever you claim that you lost the manual for something, people assume
>that you pirated it.
>-- 
>David Huang                                 |

You CAN pirate hardware.  I've done it several times.  There was the
S.A.M. (Software Automatic Mouth) Speech Synthesizer card which was
basically a simple 8-bit D/A converter which I built from the
schematic in a photocopied manual (BTW, I've never seen this product
for sale anywhere).  There was also a $900 Theatre Lighting board
with 16 channels and the company actually gave away the software as
a demo (thinking that the customer would be forced to buy the
hardware).  The demo was written in Basic and was only protected by a
text file which either had "DEMO" in it or not.  After creating a
text file which enabled the full software, I called up a menu which
produced a parts list.  Based on the parts list and the assembly
language routines called from the Basic program, I was able to design
plans for a compatible card (never built the card though, not much
use for it).

You have to have the ability to do a little redesigning, but it is as
much of a price savings as software pirating.  The difference is that
you do not have to be able to design full blown software apps to
pirate software, but you DO have to be able to design fully
functional peripherals to pirate hardware.

Soapbox Commentary:

If clone makers can look at the specs for the IBM PC and redesign it
for their own product, is it acceptable to redesign an Apple
peripheral and market it as your own product?  I don't know, all of
my pirated hardware is for personal use only - sort of an exercise in
hardware design.  I don't feel guilty about my hardware pirating, but
I do feel pissed when I catch other companies pirating Apple's stuff.

SMT, the makers of the No-Slot Clock, have a 1-Meg Memory Expansion
card for the Apple ][.  I purchased an unpopulated card for $99, and
I was happy to save money compared to Apple's price.  Then, when I
had some compatibility problems on an Apple ][ Plus with the
TransWarp card, I set about to disassemble the ROMs and found that
SMT had copied Apple's ROMs.  They actually bothered to break up the
code into subroutine segments and scramble the ordering, but they
went so far as to duplicate Apple's ROM bug in the 1-Meg card
(documented in the TechNotes as a harmless error).  This really
pissed me off to see that SMT had done so little work and was
competing with Apple using Apple's code.

I did find the bug which caused the 1-Meg card to screw up the
TransWarp on the ][ Plus, and came up with a ROM patch to fix it.
I even called Applied Engineering and talked to an engineer who felt
that they should have a work around in their product.  I purchased an
official Apple 1-Meg card and it had the same symptom, so I copied
the ROM, inserted my patch (same code, different location) and
returned the Apple 1-Meg card as incompatible with my system.  I feel
a little guilty about copying Apple's ROMs, but I'm not selling my
patched version.

P.S. The ROM had an unused section that would have been mapped to
slot 0 except that there is no ROM space for slot 0.  Apple's
engineer put a cute little message about this product improving
mankinds situation.  SMT overwrote the cute message with a cold and
formal copyright notice.  What a bunch of jerks!

End Soapbox Commentary.

Brian Willoughby
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