31 Dec
2008
31 Dec
'08
12:08 p.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
:-(
I was worrying about my LVROM player a few weeks ago, but looking at board
photos (the physical thing's in storage) that's based on the 8031 and not 8051
as I'd remembered, so it should just need external ROM (which I've already
backed up)
I'm not sure what else I have which falls into the embedded-ROM category. Of
course I do have various custom* ULAs in things which are similarly awkward to
handle.
* A drop-in replacement for Acorn's TUBE ULA would be nice - I used my last
remaining spare a couple of years ago, and still have a couple of devices with
dead ones - swapping in from a working unit is a real pain.
cheers
Jules
What do people
do regarding microcontrollers (old or new) with
embedded ROM? I
mean an EPROM or PROM's just address lines and data, so reasonably easy to
dump - but presumably life's a bit more difficult when the ROM is
local to the CPU...
If you're lucky, eitehr th microcontroller is old enough not to have any
security features, or they're not used. In which case you remove the chip
from the PCB and stick it in a suitable programmer.
If you're unlucky then either the microcontroller doesn't have any
external access to the ROM (some mask-programmed ones are like that), or
the secutrity bit has been set so you can't read it out. In which case,
alas, you just pray it never fails...