How to read a BIOS in an EPROM 29EE10 ?

[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]

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.

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