SuperCard Plus

SuperCard Plus (sometimes referred to as SC+) was the follow-up to Utilities Unlimited's successful disk copying hardware. Compatible with the VIC-1540, 1541, 1541-II, 1571, Indus GT, Excelerator Plus, FSD-1, and other drives, this device allowed users to make identical and/or parameter based backups. Sometimes due to CBM disk drives always being slightly out of alignment, it was better to remove or 'dumb down' the copy protection on the target disk.

SuperCard+ consisted of 3 address decoders (two 74HC138 chips and one 74HC157 chip), 8K of 120ns (or 150ns) static RAM (at $6000), and 8K of EPROM (of which only the 1st 2K were mapped into memory at $1000). The SuperCard+ board could be used with other copiers that used the extra static RAM, providing they had a means of setting the RAM address. None of the SuperCard+ software could be used on other copying hardware due to the fact that it makes extensive use of its EPROM for handling copying.

There were 17 revisions of the SuperCard+ software made, with 6 major versions (v1.0-v6.0). The majority of the software was derrived from SuperCard, which came from ECHO by Final Source Software. A version of ECHO was created for fixing Megasoft's Shadow board.

The software and hardware was all created by Jim Drew, who worked under contract with Megasoft and was later hired to lead Utilities Unlimited's product development. He went on to create numerous other products for the C64, Amiga, and PC platforms. Although (deliberately) controversial, his products were often the first of their kind and broke many boundries. With the resurgence of retro computing he has been updating the SuperCard Plus software package and is releasing an all new "SuperCard Pro" board that will duplicate and image any type of disk format using standard 3.5" and 5.25" PC compatible floppy drives.