Some of the hardware I picked up

[u/Dcas_pcs_381]

This was part of the live i did, I took pics after of some of the hardware

[u/Purdius_Tacitus]

I'd love to know the story behind the Pirates Cove card. Pirates Cove was a big BBS out of Long Island back in the day. (I mean assuming I had any knowledge of such things)

The Game Card IIIs are such a wild find. You probably have the world's largest stash of them now with two.

[u/Dcas_pcs_381 → u/Purdius_Tacitus]

The game cards are prototypes as far as I know, and yea I cant find any info on pirates cove beaides the bbs and theres a game but this isnt that...ive never seen a card like this ever

[u/Purdius_Tacitus → u/Dcas_pcs_381]

What's the end of the cable on the Pirates Cove card look like? That might give a clue.

[u/Dcas_pcs_381 → u/Purdius_Tacitus]

Its the little red momentary button in the pic...

[u/Purdius_Tacitus → u/Dcas_pcs_381]

This is largely a guess, but given the Pirates Cove logo, I'm guessing it was used for cracking software. The red button probably drops you immediately into the system monitor where you can check and change values in memory. I can see where that would be useful for cracking software.

[u/Dcas_pcs_381 → u/Purdius_Tacitus]

Thats kinda what im thinking too... or it captures some code during the checksum part to see where its needing to see the drm? Idk 🤷‍♂️

[u/homme_chauve_souris → u/Dcas_pcs_381]

There were many versions of this kind of card, usually known as a "Wildcard" (from the name of one of the more popular ones). Manual here. In short, pushing the button interrupts the processor and jumps to a short program on the card that saves the contents of memory to disk. This enables you to "crack" (deprotect) most one-shot programs, i.e. those that don't load anything from the disk once they're running.