Electronics > Repair
Vintage chip Programmer : " Micropross ROM 3000U "
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m k:
I'd say that this floppy emulator thingy is the hardware everybody will eventually need.
Maybe that's the next step, after all the upcoming WIN/DOS stuff.
Vince:
Thanks people !

Yes this is it, that's this ImageDisk S/W, thanks for the link to download it.

That video is cool, Adrian is getting very nerdy in this one. At 13minutes he uses some sci-fi class graphical S/W to work at a super low level on that floppy !!  :o
... makes ImageDisk look very simple in comparison... so I will make the effort to lean to use t.

That video was interesting and relates to my problem, when he speaks about DD and HD floppy drives, and "sfot" and "hard" sectors, never heard about that before, I have now.
I note that the README file for ImageDisk also mentions it works for soft sector drives.
Adrian says you CAN make a DD disk on an HD drive but it's pot luck. Much more reliable if you can do it with a proper DD drive to begin with.
I have plenty of floppy drives... I am sure none of them are old enough to be DD only, but at least if one is giving troubles, I have many others to try out...

Video confirms what I read on the French forum : guy had to convert the disk image to the IMD format used by ImageDisk, before he could write it to an actual floppy.
Says the IMD format basically is just adding meta data to tell the S/W what low levels parameters to use... which means you have to know these to begin with... it's chicken and egg situation.
But the guy on the forum who used ImageDisk I think must just read his existing system disk, that came with the machine, so that ImageDisk could read it and firugre out the low level parameters.

Yeah.... I am starting to see how it all works, hope is seeping into my head....

Video : yes I remember those expensive video converters.... expensive, too much for me right now. I will resort to that only if I fail with that GBS-8200 tweaking S/W.
I also think I have got to the point where I can tidy up my mess in that department : A huge breadboard sitting inside the programmer, lots of chips, lots of wires... not very practical when I need to put the programmer aside, then put it back on the bench time and time again.... and I can't use the breadboard for other things ! >:(

So now that we have figured th video problem, I think it's time to tidy up all that mess. So I will get rid of the breadboard, make a little board, tidy up the wiring etc...
From our experiences it looks like I don't need the inverter chip to reverse the polarity, nor the HCT buffer either.. I just need the one TTL  XNOR chip and the pull-up resistor for it... and that's it !
So I will order a bunch of cheap proto boards in small sizes, and make something very clean and compact.


OK, I kept the best for dessert !!!

An hour ago, on the French forum someone pointed out to me that in the big ZIP file on of them sent to me, there was an .EXE file in the ROM3000 folder hmmmmm !!!!!!
Yummy !

File is barely 100KB in size so I had not much hope that it would be our remote control S/W.... but of course I was curious, so I loaded the program inside of DOSBOX emulator, and see what it resulted in !
YES, this S/W tries to connect to the programmer via the serial port !!!  :D
I took screen shots of all, not many, screen I get greeted with : first a black screen with just a prompt asking my if I have a colour or monochrome monitor, and to what COM port on the PC, I connected the programmer.



So I answer that and then I get a more fancy / user friendly screen, that says it's S/W version 7.7, and displays that screen while it's trying to connect to the programmer.
It stays there forever (well maybe it would eventually time out if I stayed there for an hour...), so I press the ESC key to get out of there.




Then it reacts by showing me this marvelous help screen that explains how to proceed to connect to the programmer :

1) connect it the serial port #1 of the programmer

2) Boot the programmer from his system disk

3) The best bit I absolutely needed : it gives you an ASCII "graphical" representation of the 6 DIP switches at the back of the programmer to tell you how to set them to configure the serial port properly !! VICTORY !!!  :box:




OMG... I am in business now !

So I need to dig out my Vintage PC, get a cable... luckily I think I have a DB9 to DB25 adapter somewhere....


STAY TUNED !!!  :D

pcprogrammer:
Hi Vince,

to make the needed floppies you can probably just use the drive from the programmer itself. By the looks of it it uses a 34 pin ribbon cable, which might have the same layout as the drives found in PC's.

Since it uses a western digital controller it should not be to hard to verify the connections.

I found a bunch of DD disks in my stash. Have to see if they don't hold any secrets, but if not you can have some if you like.  8)
Vince:
OK... I was so excited, I did make the effort to set up my vintage PC.

Pushed some stuff aside the bench, managed to free a square foot of space, just enough to sit the computer case in that spot.
K/B and monitor... conveniently sitting atop the EPROM programmer, so no space problem here, great.

Transfered the MS-DOS program easily to the vintage PC thanks to prior experiments to network my vintage PC and my main desktop computer.
So that was already working, took only a couple minutes to get the file onto the vintage PC.

I have got Windows2000 and Win95 on that computer, so started Win95. Launched the program in a window.... crashed.
OK fair enough... so I rebooted the machine and pressed F8 to get the boot menu options. Selected "MS-DOS prompt only", to get a real DOS environment.... I thought.
Nope, program still crashed ! Look, it displays a few line of garbage then computers is unresponsive... only thing the K/B reacts to, is ALT+CTRL+DEL ...

You just can't make that shit up can you !!!   :scared:

This freaking program works fine inside a shitty DOS emulator under a modern Linux computer... but it crashes miserably on a Vintage PC of the era ?!   :wtf:

I.... I.... I don't know what to think.... I am cursed, that must be it.

If you can make any sense of the crap it threw on the screen when it crashed, be sure to speak up.

What good is my vintage PC if it can't run old DOS programs ?

I don't understand what's going on..... bakc in the day when Win95 came out, I was under the understanding that the "MSDOS only" boot option gave you an actual DOS environment, so you had 100% compatibility with your old DOS programs... because it was running an actual DOS, not an emulation or anything. Looks like maybe that was not 100.0000 % true ?

Or maybe it's some weird incompatibility that particular computer ? It's an IBM Aptiva, custom motherboard... I know back in the day seom had problems with the supplied modem or sound card... but I am not using any of that. You would think the serial port would be something that's hard to get wrong would you ?

I just do'nt know... I am.. baffled, and massively disappointed and depressed....

The program is a single, standalone EXE file, under 100KB... so I can post it here. Please download it and try it on your Win95/98 machines if you have one, in windowed as well MS-DOS only modes, and tell me what you get.... please...
EDIT : apparently EXE files is not an allowed file format on this forum. So I renamed the file to change the extension to "PDF" instead... so just rename it back to .EXE before use...


Messtechniker:
Fascinating digital electronics archeology. 8) 8)
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