Electronics > Repair
Vintage chip Programmer : " Micropross ROM 3000U "
<< < (19/38) > >>
Paceguy:
I'm glad to see that your persistence has paid off and that you got it up and running. félicitations !
pcprogrammer:

--- Quote from: Vince on December 29, 2022, 03:51:58 pm ---@ 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...

--- End quote ---

That is the benefit of saving stuff. My stash is way bigger then your 6 boxes, but only a handful are DD 1.0MB  :palm:

Great find about the ANSI.SYS. Guess it is not installed on my DOS machine.
Vince:
OK ladies and gentlemen, we have already made some more progress in the last hour... but it's a mixed bad... there is some good news... and some bad news.
Let's start with the good ones.

1) By shear luck I did eventually find the missing M/M DB25 gender changer I needed to complete mt DB9 to DB25 adaptation "stack" so to speak.
Turns out if was right under my nose on the bench... because, I had been using that changer a few months back I now recall, to tap the serial signals, for fun, from the back of my Metrix MX554 bench DMM.

2) So I was able at last to plug my serial cable to the programmer....

3) Sadly the MSDOS S/W still complained that the serial link was not working, giving me the same help screen as before....

4) Then realised I failed to follow that screen's instructions : POWER UP the programmer you fucktard !  :palm:

5) So I power it up and let it boot, then run the MSDOS S/W again and.... it immediately connects successfully to the programmer, first time, not even kidding !!
I just could not believe it... with my luck, I was listing all the things that could go wrong here and prevent me from achieving success.... like the S/W not being able to use the serial port for XYZ reason, or a bad cable, or need to swap RX and TX lines, or god knows what else could go wrong. But no, worked first time, I was amazed !!!  :D


OK, so now the bad news.... How am I so sure that it successfully connected to the programmer ?

Well.... see for yourself... it must have talked to the programmer and the latter told him "Hi, I am ROM 3000U "model, then the MSDOS program in return tellin me, I quote him :

" WTF !!!   I told you I am meant for use with the ROM 3000B ans this is NOT a 3000B !!! "

.... while flashing and beeping at me constantly in a very angry manner.... At that point the program is unresponsive to the K/B. The only way to make the lab quiet again was to reboot the PC...




OK so that's bad... I really hoped that S/W would at least work somewhat, and at worse maybe some features or details would not work 100%, but at least I was hoping for basic functionality... but no.

Still, I am trying to see the bright side of things :

1) Well we found that MSDOS S/W....
2) we got it to run on my vintage PC
3) we got the serial link working
4) The programmer replied to the computer, which means that maybe it did indeed successfully boot from its system disk, and both the drive and disk are good.... or maybe not : maybe it's just the F/W from EPROM that's replied to the computer. We just don't know. PC only complains that it's not a 300B but it doesn't say if the programmer replied " I am 5000B " or if it said ' I am a 3000U ".

So, that's a real bummer, I was so hopeful  :(

But not time for depression.... we need to move forward don't we... so what could we do from there ?

- Well we could hook a monitor again to the programmer, to see if it displays something interesting while the PC is communication with it.
But that requires two monitors on the bench, and opening up the programmer again, bread board again, video board again, lots of mess again.... there is just not enough space on the bench for that kind of experiment.... but needs to be done anyway. So I need to free some space buy completing some long overdue TE project, so I can move them out of the bench. Thinking the two Rochar Niksee DVM, the two QUAD amps, and also my rack mount Tektronix type RM17 waiting for a 3 section can cap to be replaced. I got the new caps, just need to find the motivation (wanted to make my own little adapter PCB on Kicad for something neat and tidy, but never got round to it...).
Then as I said earlier, I need to get rid of that large breadboard and all that mess of wires, need to replace all that with a neat little tiny prototype board I could leave inside the programmer permanently, with just wires sticking out of it, that would go the the GBS-8200 video board. That would considerably lower the mess on the bench.

- Then, something lese we could try : since the programmer thnks its a 5000 model and it's possible that it only turns into a 3000 model once it's booted from the system disk.... then that means maybe if I booted the thing from a 3000B disk rather than my 3000U disk....... I could turn my programmer into a 3000B and the PC S/W would then be happy ?
Worth a shot.... but we need a 3000B disk image then ! No worries... we have that, it was bundled with the MSDOS EXE file  8)

So that means I need to get cracking and start experimenting with creating these special / non standard system disks, using my NOS DD disks and installing that ImageDisk S/W....
That will be my first time doing that kind of stuff, so I expect the road will be long and bumpy, but it needs to be done.... and the knowledge and experienced gained thusly will no doubt be useful in the long term when working on other vintage pieces of kit, since I seem to enjoy these so much....  :-//


OK so... let's do all that then, see you later for the next installment !


EDIT : oh got an idea ! Maybe I could sniff the serial link to see what the programmer replies to the computer ! Maybe it's plain ASCII text and we could be 100% sure of whether it reports being a 5000B or a 3000U !   Oh I love this programmer, so much cool stuff you can do with it !!!   :)

Vince:
Did a quick test : powered up the programmer but with no boot disk in it, so that I am sure it still thinks it's a 5000 model not a 3000. If I do that, the MSDOS S/W fails to communicate with the programmer.
So the programmer can only communicate once it has booted from the system disk.... so most likely it reported to the MSDOS S/W that it was a 3000U rather than a 3000B.

That's all...  :-//
Vince:
Oh no.... I did the unthinkable, my curiosity will kill me.... I made my super messy bench even messier... I truly think I have now reached the epitome of the concept of mess....

Yes... I added another monitor / TV, brought back the bread board and video board and somehow made it all fit ?!  :o
I tried to tidy up the breadboard as much as I could : removed two fo the chips : inverter chip and buffer chip, leaving only the XOR gate, and as few wires as possible.




So I can see if the programmer display anything on the screen while the MSDOS program is communicating with it, and complaining that's it's not the correct model....

Well as you can see, I was well rewarded, glad I made the effort of trying to make it all fit no the bench !  8)

When I had a look at the manual for the 5000 model, I saw among many other things, that the 5000 had a cool feature where you could use it a regular serial terminal to spy serial coms for general purpose debugging... neat eh ?

Well looks like my 3000 model is doing just that !  8)

The coms appear to be plain text, great, and the programmer displays it in real time. It's even nice enough to keep the menu bar visible once the screen is full with text.

So what do we see ?

Looks like it's a quick exchange. The MSDOS S/W sends a couple lines of text, and the programmer replies with the same, and then it just repeats endlessly.

They are nice enough to have programmed the font with special symbols to represent non-printable ASCII characters like <CR> <LF> and also this <EX> one which I didn't know but Googled an ASCII table and it most likely stands for the control character 0x03 = ETX = End of Text.

It seems likely, because this EX symbol is used only once by both the PC and the ROM3000, as the very last character they send.



So the format appears to be :

1) first the PC send the keyword "BOOT", then <CR> to start a new line. Then repeats BOOT again, this time followed by numerical value / parameter, which probably meaning " Who am I talking to  please ? "". then ends the string with that ETX control character.

2) Then the ROM3000 replies in the exact same manner, using the keyword " HELLO " .. well more like HELO because French people are so good at English eh...  :palm: especially 40 years ago when this thing was designed. Then new line, repeats the HELLO keyword and send his reply, which contains 3 numerical values followed by a string representing the revision number of the system : " 5.40 AP " whic matches what it displays, flashing, when it boots the on the system disk. So it adds up.

However the label on the floppy says it's version " 5.5 APR "... so either they meant to write 5.4 AP, or they meant to write a 5.5. APR image disk on that floppy.....




Anyway, that's super cool, I am so happy I made such a mess of my bench, sometimes you get rewarded !  8)


VIDEO of the experience !!!   I start with the programmer already booted, with the menu bar at the top, then I start the MSDOS S/W, and you can see the COMS scrolling by on the programmers screen.

Navigation
Message Index
Next page
Previous page
There was an error while thanking
Thanking...

Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod