| Electronics > Repair |
| Vintage chip Programmer : " Micropross ROM 3000U " |
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| Vince:
--- Quote from: pcprogrammer on December 29, 2022, 02:07:42 pm ---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. --- End quote --- Yes... good idea 8) --- Quote from: pcprogrammer on December 29, 2022, 02:07:42 pm ---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) --- End quote --- Thank you very moosh !!! :-+ I now remember something I forgot to reply to , I think it was Terra : the programmer, from what the guys said, well the 5000 model at least, does offer you options to format disks and copy them. Not very helpful for me right now, but I thought I would mention it anyway, for the sake of completeness ! ;D |
| pcprogrammer:
Hi Vince, I tried the executable on an actual dos machine (Pentium III with I think MS-DOS V6.22 but did not check) and it fails in the same way :-DD Checked the floppies and two read as empty and on two others there is some useless crap. So these you can have. Others fail to read for some reason and some have old project data on them. Since I'm using a 1.44MB drive I didn't want to try and format them. |
| Vince:
Oh you won't believe it, I have managed to fix it,in just a few minutes, look !!!! :box: Got lucky on that one ! :) Above, I posted the crap that the program throw when it crashed under the MSDOS only mode. First I thought it does not look like complete garbage... more like "escape codes" that I would type in my autoexec.bat to draw a menu on startup, to launch my programs from.... 25 years ago when I was at high-school and into MSDOS on my mighty 486SX33 with a whooping 4MB of RAM and Windows 3.1... Then, I noticed that when I run and crash the program in WIDOWEd mode, under Win95 that is... I get a slightly different crap on the scree, see : I get the same escape codes at the beginning, but then I get a bit more characters after that, which I highlighted in yellow.It looked like the ASCII text that corresponds to the help screen I was getting under DOSBOX, that tells you how to configure the DIP switches at the back of the programmer.... so it's not total garbage then... it's like the program just spew its guts out on the screen... Then right before that stuff in yellow, I spotted some more intelligible characters, circled in red.... it says " DEVICE=ANSI.SYS in the file CONFIG.SYS ". Eh ? Hmmmm... maybe it's just a DOS config file problem, maybe it requires you to load ANSI.SYS in CONFIG.SYS at startup ?! So I googled for ANSI.SYS... hmm that looked interesting / relevant : apparently ANSI.SYS is required to get escape sequences to work, BINGO ! ... and also to configure the screen for text mode programs (number of columns and rows)... BINGO AGAIN !!! Looking good, worth a shot ! So I edit config.sys to add " DEVICE=ANSI.SYS ", restart the computer in MS-DOS mode and.... get an error, says that ANSI is missing or corrupted ! :blah: some more Googling... OK, I need to specify the full path to ANSI apparently... and ina windows machine MS moved all the old MSDOS utility files inside C;\WINDOWS\COMMAND. Checked there, yes ANSI.SYS and many other old familiar names are there, great. So I update the path in CONFIG.SYS and try again.... the program works now, YES !!!!! :box: Next step / problem : the serial cable !! I ahve a fex, both straight and crossed... don't know which type I am supposed to be using but it's easy enough to try out both and see what happens. No, my problem is plug type ! My cables DB9, but it's old DB25 on the programmer side... I do have a 9/25 adapter but... it does not feature the approriate gender on either side... I need a gender changer on both side of the adapter... I do have the required DB9 changer, phew.... but the DB25 changer I don't ! I have two of them but tehy are F/F and I need M/M ! :palm: Told you, I am cursed... So I need that changer to complete the "stack".... and/or maybe try to find a 9/25 changer with the appropriate sex on both side, so that I don't have to use any gender changer to begin with... Of course I can't wait for that to happen, so maybe I will just go cave man style and just stick bits of wires inside the DB25 holes / pins.... and call it a day >:D |
| TERRA Operative:
I tried your exe on my Dell Precision M410 running native DOS 6.22 and it works fine. But you beat me to get it working. :D I guess I have the ansi.sys thing already sorted on my PC. :) |
| Vince:
Thanks for trying the program chaps ! Terra yes since your machine is a true MSDOS one not some Win95 thing, no doubt it came with all the bells and whistles as standards... @ PCprogrammer : thanks for the offer ! ... I may not have to steal from you though : I just searched my old computer junk boxes, and found more 3.5" diskettes than I thought was possible ! 6 boxes of them ! ... one of them is brand new, never used... 3M box of double sided DD 1.0 MB floppies, YEAH !!!! :) Will any of these floppies actually be working ? I guess I will find out... |
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