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Re[2]: [emax] Using Programmed PIC micro Controller

Re[2]: [emax] Using Programmed PIC micro Controller

2009-08-08 by tu@...

The boot EPROM would be a good place to start as it must contain code to load the base OS overlay from floppy or SCSI/HDD. Some hacking there 
could allow the OS code to instead be loaded from another ROM chip added in somewhere on the CPU bus.

Saturday, August 8, 2009, 8:40:02 AM, you wrote: 

>
  
> The Emax main CPU is a National Semiconductor NS32008 and the data 
sheets are included in the NS32000 Family databook, which is available 
for free
> download from 
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/national/_dataBooks/1986_NS32000_dataBook.pdf
>
oooh! cool! I hadn't thought to look.

> I think the issue is more that without the OS source code and 
documentation it is a long and grueling task to go through the OS 
binaries to disassemble
> them and understand how they work. There will no doubt also be 
various design constraints that can only really be discovered by trial 
and error when
> you don't have the original design documentation. Then you still need 
an assembler to reassemble the modified code.... but it can be done...
>
actually with the opcodes it should be very possible to disassemble the 
code, and make changes... yeah it'd be a bit of a slog, but not really 
much more than what esynthesist already did with the sample format.

and people have already done this for other samplers.

especially if you're just looking for something like the HDD code, to 
enable a wider range of SCSI devices, bigger sizes, and more banks... or 
the boot code, to put the OS onto an eeprom.

You'd just need to look for memory accesses at the location where the 
related hardware is, and then poke around looking for what interacts 
with that code.

Move to quarantaine

This moves the raw source file on disk only. The archive index is not changed automatically, so you still need to run a manual refresh afterward.