On 9 Aug 2012 at 17:57, P Gebhardt wrote:
I'd like to ask the list, what kind of
tools/porgrams do you use in
order to dump especially older device types as we can find it in older
computer equipment? A couple of years back, I was lucky to use an old
system at University in order to dump PAL and EPROM contents of my
Onyx C8000 and from a DEC DELUA board. But since then, I've never had
accessibility to such tools and I'l like to obtain/purchase one in
order to go on with programmable device content saving.
I'm assuming that the subject PALs have had the security fuses blown,
so that it's impossible to simply read the contents of the fuse map
using a programmer.
As long as it's simple combinatorial logic with no feedback terms in
PAL, it's simple enough to do a "brute force" dump. You may want to
see my blog over at
vintage-computer.com on the subject. I show how
dumps were done for an AT&T 6300 video PAL, a Soundblaster PAL and a
Trantor SCSI adapter PAL.
Registered PALs and PALs with internal feedback are another kettle of
fish--I don't know of any easy way to crack that nut.
I did my dumps using nothing more than simple TTL logic feeding into
a parallel port on a PC. If I had to do it over, I'd probably use a
small MCU.to do the deed.
I don't see why EPROMs can't be dumped by a similar brute force
method. I used this method to dump a couple of bipolar PROMs; one
from the IBM PC XT and the other from a "bus
correction" PROM from
the 6300. In both cases, we found that it was possible
to recode the
contents as GAL equations.
--Chuck