After battling for days with a Dolch 65 that developed the two-tone
beep-of-death on boot, I finally found that it's just my BIOS ROM that has
gone bad. The BIOS happens to be an Award BIOS, says "Award 1998 PCI/PNP
686" on the chip. It's a square chip with pins on the side.
Photo here:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1OtZ1AU0Hac8RlzTgbgCY4z_qcMlGWXu1
So I thought I might just ask. Anyone has a dead Dolch 65 motherboard from
which I could steal a BIOS chip. The board is actually an Advantech CI6BM-B1
industrial single board computer.
Or alternately, can someone identify what kind of ROM or EEPROM that likely
is, and provide advice on how to read the data from a good chip (I have
another good chip in another Dolch, that's how I found out what my problem
was), and program a similar chip.
Marc
Hi friends. I have a 1990's vintage commercial radio system that uses an 80C85A CPU. I am looking to hopefully modify the firmware to make some small changes in its behavior. The firmware is contained in two EPROMS.
Can anyone recommend a decent disassembler to use with this? Preferably something that ran in windows 10 or windows 7? A dos box would be fine too.
Also, I looked through the dumped contents of the EPROM. In the past I have seen EPROM ascii dumps where most is unintelligible to the naked eye but typically text messages give to the users during interaction with the program are human readable. In this case, the ASCII dump shows only other HEX data. I believe I read that there is a HEX format and that I might need to convert from HEX to BIN before disassembling. Of course, an ideal tool would do both if anyone knows such a thing.
I am not familiar with 8085 stuff but any insight would be appreciated.
Lastly, I wonder if there might be some kind of checksum check to prevent tampering. Is there a common way this is handled in 8085 world? Or is it entirely programmer dependent?
Thanks for your time
Eugene W2HX?
Hey all,
I snagged a Kaypro II a short while ago which I finally got around to
looking at. After some minor TLC to the drives, it's booting.
However, the keyboard appears unresponsive. Pressing keys (with the
exception of caps-lock, the two shifts, and ctrl) results in a buzz/click
>from within the keyboard - if I'm interpreting the schematics right, the
click is actually driven by the system in response to a keypress, which
suggests that my keyswitches are OK (I believe these use a foam disc
approach, which are prone to deterioration) and that keyboard data is being
received OK (at least on some low level).
Any suggestions for possible things to investigate? It doesn't feel like a
memory fault, given that it's using 64kx1 ICs and booting as far as a
prompt, but I suppose it's possible.
On the back of this, I'm in need of three keyswitches, if anyone happens to
have a parts machine and would be willing to sell any. A student of the
machine's previous owner dropped the keyboard years ago and broke three of
the keys off. I have the keycaps, but the switch stems are broken and it
would probably be easier to replace the entire stem portions rather than
attempting to glue things back together.
cheers
Jules
The VAX 4000-200 I exhibited two years ago at VCF East is up for sale:
Restoration Notes:
http://www.vintagecomputer.net/browse_thread.cfm?id=608
I don't need it as much anymore now that it's pretty much a completed
project. It's very upgrade-able though if you have the desire to boost
performance and ports, etc.
The provenance of this machine, I believe, was as part of WVLink a West
Virginia email/gopher/USNET type ISP server in the early-mid 1990's.
I have it set up for telnet communications if interested. Contact me via
http://www.vintagecomputer.net/contact.cfm
Bill
Good condition AlphaServer 300, always been stored in dry conditions.
Photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/5N66yIlEUCYkuh012
It has a TGA based DEC graphics card that will do 1280x1024 24 bit (it's a
ZLXp-E2 PBXGA-BA) - manual included.
Ultrawide 16-bit SCSI card
Brand new Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 36.7GB,Internal,15000RPM,3.5" (ST336754LW)
HDD
Ultraplex SCSI CDROM drive.
Running OpenVMS Alpha 8.3 with CDE. Can also run tru64 5.x.
All working as it should be. Very quiet system. Can provide copies of media
if required.
?175 + postage at cost.
I can supply an LK461 keyboard and mouse for an additional ?25.
I have one of these, see the photos:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/CnLnSKTCzHETzpOo1
It was bought new by myself a few years back. It can run off a PP9 battery.
?10 shipped in the UK if anyone is interested.
Regards, Mark.
I recently decided to make scan a paperback book that I happen to have two copies of. It is "RSX A Guide for Users by John Pieper? published in 1987 by DEC. I have not seen a copy of it in any of the online sources like bit savers. For anyone just starting out with RSX it is a nice general read that also covers some system topics like backups, etc. similar to the paper back VAX/VMS user and system manager books.
I?d like to make it available online but wasn?t sure how to submit it. It is about 38 MB in size so bigger than an email (at my email).
Since I didn?t have an industrial book shear to remove the binding, I used a belt sander to remove enough go the binding to pull the pages free easily and then used a paper cutter to trim the pages a bit to remove any last traces of glue that would have jammed the scanner. The book is about 360 pages.
Thanks,
Mark Matlock
