Rumor has it that Cameron Kaiser may have mentioned these words:
> > About the best I could do is to snail-mail the ROM to
> > you. -or- I'll be in San Diego tomorrow - Monday.
>
>That's a very generous offer, but there are two problems ... first I'm
>presently in San Bernardino :( and won't be back in San Diego until Sunday,
>and only Sunday at that.
>
>The bigger problem, though, is actually getting the capsule out to read it.
>I opened up my HHC-4 and dug out the NYL capsules, which I hadn't examined
>too closely before. They *seem* to be regular 24-pin EPROMs (with an NYL
>sticker conveniently covering the UV window; they're 4K TMS 2532s, for those
>interested).
Hrm... that's a different chip than what I have for them - Motorola MCM
68764C and MCM 68766C -- are they pin-compatible to TMS2532s? They're 8Kx8,
IIRC.
What I *Do* have is the gizmothingy converter that plugs into a standard
eprom programmer to program these things. I reprogrammed a couple for use
on my old Tandy CoCo1 for extended basic... (just to see if it would work ;-) )
I have 2 programmers that can read/write these - one on my CoCo (read:
*way* down deep in the pile... would take lots of digging to get at) and my
Xeltek Superpro/L, which needs DOS and a parallel port (both of which I'm
currently experimenting with under VirtualPC 2004 on my Shuttle machine at
work). I should be ready by next week to do eprom programming, if not
sooner. [[ I was having a problem with VirtualPC - 2 different speeds of
RAM in my computer. Win2K was ultra-stable as usual, but amazingly,
compiling things under Linux under VirtualPC was segfaulting... Odd. ]]
I've never programmed one of these with my SuperPro before, but I have...
um... 20 *pounds* or so of these EPROMs, so I have more than a few test
subjects I can sacrifice to the gods... ;-)
I can let the list know when I'm ready -- I've finally dug out the chips
(and will be getting ready to mail a few who've asked me before for them,
as they work on some flavor of DEC hardware as well)
>The problem is not the chip, which seems to be a regular old
>ROM. The problem is that the DIP legs are wrapped *around* the capsule
>carrier, and digging the DIP out is probably going to damage the chip.
If you're careful, it can be done. I've done it to put one in my Tandy
CoCo1 for extended basic.
>Is the BASIC ROM similarly "wrapped" on yours? If it is, perhaps there's
>another way of doing this -- some way of reading out the contents of the ROM
>using the HHC itself.
Without the Forth or Basic (which hopefully would support PEEK or some
other direct memory access) I'm not sure how you could, short of writing a
ML program, burning it to a ROM and inserting it...
>All this to say I would be *very* antsy about damaging a *very* rare ROM
>with my relatively novice EE skills, despite the fact I want it *very* much!
Want a few extra chips to fiddle with? ;-P
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Profile, don't speculate."
sysadmin, Iceberg Computers | Daniel J. Bernstein
zmerch_at_30below.com |
Received on Mon Aug 30 2004 - 12:57:17 BST