Steve wrote:
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The drive speed MOD for the 810 was a modification the gave the 810 Happy drive the ability to physically slow the actual speed of the drive motor WAAAAY down from the standard 288RPM all the way to @170RPM
during an actual Happy backup of the EOA 34 Sector/track protection schemes.
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I don't believe that this ability was copied on the 1050 Happy, The Happy company caved-into pressure/threats from the industry. This is THE reason Happy HAD to create the PDB system! They MADE Happy alter the copy so that anything needing a PDB file would only run on a Happy drive.
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This is completely wrong.
In first place slowing down the drive (disregarding how you do it) cannot, and wasn’t designed, to copy tracks with 34 sectors. Slowing down the drive you can create tracks with 20, or at most 21 sectors.
Protections with many sectors don’t have full sized sectors, the sectors are short or overlapped. They are not created slowing down the drive. Furthermore, those tracks on Electronic Arts disk you mention didn’t exist at that time. During the days of the Happy 810 ECA used skew alignment as protection.
You can’t slow down the drive enough to write 34 sectors. Or more precisely, you can if you insist, but you won’t be able to read them back at normal speed. I don’t know exactly what was the RPM speed of the 810 slow-mode, but of course that it wasn’t at 170 RPM. Because again, at 288 RPM you cannot read anything that was written at 170 RPM.
Slow-down mods were designed for formatting tracks with 20 full sectors. But even for this they are not very reliable. That was the main reason that the feature was discontinued in later Happy models.
Not all disks that require a PDB need to be run on a Happy drive, actually most do not. And of course that this was not related in anyway to pressure or threats from the software industry. Disk that require a Happy at runtime have protections that simply they are not possible to copy with the Happy hardware (not even with a slow-down mod). Happy could have decided to enhance the hardware to cope with these new protections. But by that time the 8-bit was slowly dying and then Happy produced the Discovery Cartridge for the Atari ST. The Discovery Cartridge can copy all Atari 8-bit disks that I know. So what kind of threats and pressure are you talking about??
