On Mar 9, 11:40, Iggy Drougge wrote:
> Since I've got myself a pretty little EPROM burner, and seem to have a
lot of
> ROMs and ROM sockets around, I thought that it should be worthwhile to
create
> a central repository for all those ROMs which are so difficult to get
> nowadays. Is this a good idea, or has somebody already done it?
I agree, it's a very good idea, so good in fact, that it's been done :-)
http://www.armory.com/~rstevew/Public/Roms/
Which reminds me that I promised Steve to send my collection. There's also
a site for Acorn/BBC Micro/Archimedes ROMs at
http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/bbc/rom/
and there's one for Commodore ROMs though I've misplaced the URL, and some
Exidy Sorcerer images at
http://www.trailingedge.com/exidy/
I started collecting ROM images about 15 years ago, when additional
"sideways ROM" software for BBC Micros was in vogue. For those who don't
know, that machine had sockets for four ROMs, typically filing systems
(disk, net, teletext, etc), languages (BASIC, Pascal, Forth, ...), or
utilities/applications (terminal emulators by the dozen, word processors,
spreadsheets, ...) which shared the same address space and were mapped in
and out by the O.S. Actually, the O.S. supported 16 sideways ROMs but you
needed extra hardware to fit that many. Anyway, at that time I repaired
lots of BBC machines, and a common(ish) problem was that people swapped
ROMs around when they had more ROMs than sockets, and inevitably broke a
pin or plugged one in backewards from time to time. Since in most cases
the only official way to replace one was to pay the full price for the
software, I (and others) made a habit of copying any ROMs we came across,
in order to be able to blow replacement EPROMs for a more cost-effective
repair later. I must have megabytes of the stuff here.
I kept this up when I started collecting other machines, and I have quite a
number of DEC ROM images (a very few of which are at
http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/) and some Exidy Sorcerer ones,
along with Apple, PET, Sirius, etc images. Even a couple from car engine
management systems! Sadly I didn't copy my original Exidy WP or DevPac
ROMs (anybody able to give me a copy?) and I've not always had the right
equipment to read some TTL PROMs, so my collection of images isn't complete
even with respect to the machines I own.
I also think it's worthwhile keeping images (or JEDEC files) for PALs where
possible, but I don't have a PAL programmer of my own so I've not got round
to doing that.
If anyone needs a ROM image to make a repair, and they think I might have
it, I'm happy to provide it.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York
Received on Fri Mar 09 2001 - 18:01:11 GMT