Wildcard Plus
East Side Software Co. (1983)
The Wildcard Plus was the last version of the Wildcard. It had a 6502 microprocessor on board, and 4K of onboard RAM for loading the disk utilities. This card could copy the entire 128K of an Apple //e's memory in less than 30 seconds. It worked in the Apple ][, ][+, and //e, as well as Franklin computers.
Like the earlier Wildcard and Wildcard 2, the Wildcard Plus was used for backing up protected software. When the button was pressed, an interrupt was generated and the entire memory of the Apple II, including the program that was running at the time, could be saved to a disk. The Wildcard Plus automatically performed the compression required to allow copies to run on machines without a Wildcard. The earlier cards required the user to use the utilities disk to "pack" the files. Another new feature of the Wildcard Plus was the ability to manipulate the Apple //e softswitches.
Thanks to JM Boutillon for supplying the photos of the card, screenshots, Wildcard Plus Utilities Disk image, scans of advertisements & reviews, and for scanning the manual.
Resources
Wildcard Plus Manual in PDF format
Wildcard Plus Utility Disk v1.01 - This is a Shrinkit disk archive (.sdk) of a 5.25" diskette.
Review of the Wildcard 2 and Wildcard Plus in Volume 5, Number 1 of Peelings II magazine (1984) - Page 1,Page 2,Page 3
References
East Side Software advertisement for the Wildcard, Wildcard 2, and Wildcard Plus.
