[h2odragon]

I never did BBC Micro, but in the early PC days there were "Copy II PC" add in ISA cards that the floppy cable passed through on the way to the drive. With their software most any floppy disk could be copied with a standard PC drive; and with a bit of hacking you could do things like read Victor 9000 floppies.

There was only one floppy I could never get, a licensed Scrabble game that insisted on writing scores to its game disc. My mom loved that game and we had to buy it twice. It was humiliating, I had this special hardware and I never did figure that one out.

* found one: https://www.biocomp.net/o62799.htm

[Firehawke]

The "Copy II PC Option Board", yeah. I knew a guy who had one, and it definitely could handle a lot of stuff that you normally couldn't. Interestingly, you really wanted an early-era board because they were forced to water down the later revisions so they couldn't copy newer protection schemes.

[dunham]

My fuzzy recollection is that the option board could read the entire track at once, raw - not MFM decoded, where the typical controller in a PC had a high level interface that only gave you sectors.

One copy protection system that I remember was a track that had a mix of long and short sectors with the short sectors embedded in the middle of the longer ones. (Sectors header/footers were marked by special bytes that were illegal MFM coding.) If a program tried to copy the the track with a normal floppy controller, they would have more sectors than would fit on a track.

[h2odragon]

The original company got bought out by Central Point, they'd been running for a bit before then. They were not quite totally opaque in "API" then, there were like maybe 3 asm examples floating around BBS and net.* era usenet.