East Side Software Co. (1982)

The Wildcard was made for the Apple ][ and ][+. It was used for "backing up" protected software. When the button was pressed, an interupt was generated and the entire 48K or 64K of memory, including the program that was running at the time, could be saved to a disk. Software was included to make a bootable "turnkey" diskette of the captured program. This worked well for programs that loaded completely into memory.

It is interesting to note that this copycard was widely copied. Below are some photos of a Wildcard clone, probably made in Taiwan or Hong Kong, that were sent to me by JM Boutillon. Notice the short piece of "zip" cord and lack of strain relief at the button. The circuit board appears to be an exact copy of the original, except the only markings on the card (other than component values) are the small letters WILD CARD on the back, and there is no information or copyright on the circuit board or ROM. The chips are socketed on this board, but soldered onto the original Wildcard. The numbers that were ground off of the chips on the original board are still present on the clone's chips.