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How to read a BIOS in an EPROM 29EE10 ?
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air_america:
Good morning to all of you.
Can you help me ?
I need to read (only read, not write) a BIOS of a old 486 mainboard .
I just want to see the hexadecimal and ASCII codes .
Is there any software (even in DOS ) to do this?
I wouldn't want to buy an EPROM programmer just to read.
The EPROM is a 29EE010 PLCC32.
Thank you all.
CJay:
--- Quote from: air_america on April 09, 2019, 11:57:56 am ---Good morning to all of you.
Can you help me ?
I need to read (only read, not write) a BIOS of a old 486 mainboard .
I just want to see the hexadecimal and ASCII codes .
Is there any software (even in DOS ) to do this?
I wouldn't want to buy an EPROM programmer just to read.
The EPROM is a 29EE010 PLCC32.
Thank you all.
--- End quote ---
You may be able to find an old network card you can plug it into, there's software that will read the contents but I think you should be able to do it with debug from a command line if you only want to see the contents
air_america:
Thank you CJay.
CJay:
You may find that the BIOS is compressed and there is little in the way of legible text, but you should be able to see fragments
johnkenyon:
My suggestion:
Find a network card with a PLCC socket, install in your PC
Find the software you need to enable the socket and/or define where it appears in the memory map. (Probably requires a boot into MSDOS).
Install the device in the network card socket, reinstall the card.
Boot the PC into MS-DOS with some form of writeable storage (floppy drive, small hard drive with FAT16 2.1Gb partition).
Use the instructions at http://mess.redump.net/dumping/dump_bios_using_debug to find and dump your ROM image.
Note that a 29EE00 is a 128k x 8 device, and some network cards may not support 128k boot roms.
The other alternative is to look for an EPROM reader - either use an old PC with a parallel port and something like the EPROMr (without the Vpp generation), or search for an Arduino based solution.
Note that I haven't done this myself - I have an EPROM programmer, and a PLCC32 to DIP adaptor.
If I didn't have that available, and the "put the device in a network card failed", I'd build myself a reader using an Arduino with a couple of counters to generate the address bits. (something like: https://www.element14.com/community/blogs/SalsCorner/2015/07/27/eprom-reader-project )
PS. I assume you've got the device datasheet at https://www.eit.lth.se/fileadmin/eit/courses/edi021/datablad/Memory/Eeprom/29ee010.pdf
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