What is SCA-III?

[kyeakel]

I got an Amiga 500 and a whole box of games, disks, etc. In the box was a 23 pin female to 23 pin male adapter with a switch on it. Taking it apart reveals that the chips have their ID's scraped off. The circuit board says SCA-III. I didn't find any manuals or disks for it, and google is too clogged up talking about the SCA virus. So, I'd like to know what it is, what the switch does, and a scan of the manual if anyone has one.

Thanks,
Kipp

 

[kb2syd]

Just a guess here, but probably an key dongle for a particular piece of software. Anyone else?

 

[pontus]

Another guess (after some googling):

A SuperCardAmi, some sort of copyright circumvention device:

http://hardware.amiga.hu/photos/supercardami2,1

 

[kyeakel]

The board does't look like the supercardami, since it has 23 pin connectors it must go on the video connector, I think..

Kipp

 

[Unknown_K]

Picture?

 

[Vlad]

since it has 23 pin connectors it must go on the video connector, I think..

SCA = Synchronous Clock Adjustment? Maybe it did something with the video signal?

Could it be some sort of Genlock device? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genlock

 

[carlsson]

I believe Pontus is spot on. There was both an internal version of SuperCardAmi for Amiga 2000 and an external version meant for the Amiga 500. Remember both the video and external floppy drive ports are DB23, just that one is male and one is female.

It seems you connect the interface to the floppy drive port, then attach an external floppy drive to the interface. If I understand correctly the copy-protected source disk should be in the external drive, and the interface is used to bypass intentionally bad sectors that otherwise would stop copying software from completing.

http://hardware.amiga.hu/exp/supercardami2

 

[kyeakel]

Pontus, Carlsson,
Looks like you're right, the picture at:
http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=1727
Looks just like the unit I have. Now to see if I have the software, and can find a copy of the manual. Not that it's any real use anymore...

Thanks!
Kipp

 

[barythrin]

Kinda cool. Not sure what one would practically use it for but it'd be interesting, maybe allow folks to make backups of some dying software.

 

[carlsson]

As I wrote, I think manufacturers on purpose added read errors to floppy disks. Regular copying programs would abort if they encountered read errors, or at least try to correct the data. This device probably just ignores such errors and/or can recreate them on the destination disk.