ROM BIOS

[Göran Axelsson]

My number one favourite string among the Vectrex cassettes is
"This space available, what the heck are you looking at?"
I don't remember which cassette it was.

I had one of these games and we plugged it into a 6809 development 
system and had a lot of fun, modifying the code.

:-)

I still have the Vectrex and it is running fine.

Göran


Eric Smith wrote:
> Randy wrote:
>   
>> This 680C62 thread reminded me of a clever thing Compaq put in their BIOS,
>> the string "None of this code is copyright IBM"
>> IBM's software would not run on a machine that did not have "copyright
>> IBM" in the BIOS.
>>     
>
> The Vectrex home game console, developed my GCE and later sold by Milton
> Bradley, would not run a cartridge that didn't contain at a fixed offset
> near the beginning the string [copyright symbol]GCE 19xx.  It became
> standard practice to fill in the xx with 00, to produce an obviously
> invalid copyright message that would nevertheless convince the Vectrex
> to run the code.
>
> In a legal battle (possibly Sega v. Accolade?), a court ruled that
> if the manufacturer built into a product a mechanism that looked for
> a specific data pattern to enable functionality, that the data pattern
> could not benefit from copyright because it is purely functional rather
> than being any form of protected expression.
>
> Eric
>
>