27 Mar
1999
27 Mar
'99
9:27 p.m.
On Mon, 22 Mar 1999, Tony Duell wrote:
Yes, I've tried an MS-DOS disk. Perhaps I could try other formats, but it
looks as though the AES 7100 needs hard sectored disks anyway.
No. I don't have anything to dump them with.
Which leads to a question I've been meaning to ask for a while:
Are there any inexpensive EPROM burners/readers on the market today?
Something that would work with antiquated PC hardware (the most modern
PC-clone machine I've got is a '286) ?
Also, how would one go about reading or writing to an EPROM that is
soldered to the printed circuit board? Is it possible to clip onto a chip
The motors
start spinning soon after the machine is powered up, but the
drive lights don't come on. Is the drive light activity for standard
drives always the same, relative to motor and/or head activity? (Actually,
No, in many cases it's jumper-selectable. For example, some machines turn
on the LED when the head loads, some when the motor starts, etc. It's
possible it's waiting for the drive to become ready.
Have you tried 'any old disk' in there? Obviously it won't boot it, but
it might trick the drive into thinking it was ready. It'd be
nice if it'd give some kind of startup message before the drives
are running, though.
There may not be enough space in the boot ROM for this (I have a number
of machines that do _nothing_ on the screen until they've booted). Have
you pulled the ROMs and dumped them to see if there are any messages in them? from the top and have it work that way? I have some
machines with
unsocketed EPROMs, as strange as it sounds.
I would, of course, really like to store copies of all ROMs in a safe
place, which would probably be 5.25" DD floppy. (My Zip drive died
recently.)
I'd really like to look inside the AES 7100's ROMs. What was the rule in
case of flaky forgetful EPROMs, Tony? Do I AND the bits from multiple
readings, or do I OR them?
-tony
--
Doug Spence
ds_spenc(a)alcor.concordia.ca
http://alcor.concordia.ca/~ds_spenc/