Reading a peripheral card's ROM and Sider HDD sasi "firmware" version.

[Keatah]

Many Apple II series peripheral cards have small ~2k eproms w/firmware on them. Has anyone ever written a program to dump those roms? I mean with a nice menu and all that? Just asking before I go and duplicate the effort or go on extended search for my eprom programmer wherever the hell I put it.

 

I'm thinking about this because I was gathering and organizing my Sider material and learned that there are three (or more) versions of the sasi interface's eprom.

 

P/N 103684A

P/N 1036840

P/N 103684-C

 

Which would this one be?

http://mirrors.apple2.org.za/Apple%20II%20Documentation%20Project/Interface%20Cards/Hard%20Disk%20Drive%20Controllers/XEBEC%20SASI%20Interface/ROM%20Images/

 

[SmileyDude]

It's really easy to read this, no special tools necessary. Just read from $Cx00 - $CxFF, where x is the slot number the card is installed in. You can even use the monitor to save it directly to tape (example for slot 6 -- replace with whatever slot you are dumping from):

*C600.C6FFW

Or if you have a floppy drive available:

]BSAVE ROM,A$C600,L$100

Edited August 28, 2014 by SmileyDude

[mjmahon]

That will get you 256 bytes of the EPROM.

 

The rest of it is bank-switched into the $C800..$CFFF space when the slot is accessed.

 

A short machine language program can:

1) deselect any switched-in I/O expansion ROM by accessing $CFFF, then

2) selecting the desired slot by referencing something in the $Csxx space, then

3) copying $C800..$CFFF to a spot in RAM (like $4000).

 

Make sure that you don't reference $CFFF until the last byte, or the ROM will be deselected. In fact, the byte read from $CFFF may be invalid!

 

Each designer took a different approach to using I/O expansion space, so expect to spend some disassembly time figuring out how it's used.

 

Some I/O EPROMS are larger than 2K, and use a further bank-switching scheme implemented on the card. Some cards (e.g.: Vulcan) also involved SRAM in the bank switching to provide on-board buffering.

[Arbee]

If possible, please find someone with an EPROM reader to do it properly, and submit it to the Apple II Documentation Project. Lack of ROM dumps and/or disk images of utilities is pretty much the #1 thing slowing down adding more emulated Apple II peripheral cards to MESS (we lucked out with the alphaSyntauri since none of the cards have any ROMs).

 

Depending on where you live, there may be someone nearby who will do it for free, or you could mail the card out if you aren't using it.

[Keatah]

Eventually when I get my new EPROM burner/reader I'll make good dumps of all my peripheral cards.

 

Hot on my list at the moment is trying to learn how to use the ipad and transfer files to and from it.

Edited September 1, 2014 by Keatah

[Arbee]

iOS 8 (which should be out in about a month) will give you a Mac/Windows style file picker to access various online storage providers (iCloud, Dropbox, etc) so you can save/load computer-style in apps once they're updated to the new functionality.

 

And great to hear you're getting an EPROM reader, that'll be excellent