Home Page Forums MAME MAME MESS Dumping Project ?

Lord Nighmare, Sorry for the delay replying. I was offline for a while and then I had to get brain, Epson, camera and light all together at the same time. Trickier than you might think, I did explain that the brain is blonde, didn't I *laughs*

I think I have the photo you want here.

http://www.stevehornsc.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/hx20roms.jpg

The blur on the left hand side is caused by the covering sheet which I of course lifted to one side for the photoshoot. I also have a photo of the whole back, in case there is something else there that you need to know.

http://www.stevehornsc.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/hx20back.jpg

One other thing that might be of interest, I bought an internal expansion for the machine, I think the cards must have been made by some enthusiast who then sold them to people, like me, who didn't want an expansion box on the side. So my machine has a whopping 32k of memory. I cannot now recall where I got it from or how we fixed it internally, but I could check the latter if it's important.

Would absolutely love to see an emulator for this fantastic machine, it's been with me all these years and is, in my view, a classic.

Carolyn

P.S. Edited again to say that I've got a bunch of programs for this machine, made mostly by my husband with a very small occasional bit of twiddling from me, including a "sideways printout" routine made by an enthusiast from an old user's group magazine. I used the machine to write letters home whilst abroad, you see. They are all on tape, no idea if the tapes are okay or not, but I do at least have printouts of everything. If any of this is of use, let me know.

In order to emulate it we'd need dumps of those ROMs and possibly details of the rest of the hardware. Since the four 24 pin ROMs are an unknown type and soldered in, and the other four 28 pin ROMs are also of an unknown type (I guess you can't dump them yourself), it will require someone else to do the job who can handle it. I can of course do it and it will be returned in the same condition, but there are possibly others closer to you (UK?) who may offer.
So it's up to you to decide what you want to do next and if anyone else steps up for the job.

Looking at the picture the ROMs are socketed, and the 4 chips below are marked RAM on the PCB.

Some docs:

ftp://ftp.ptolserv.com/pub/docs/hx20mem.pdf

http://electrickery.xs4all.nl/comp/hx20/

http://www.vintage-computer.com/epsonhx20.shtml

Guru, I'm in Scotland. My husband is clever enough, I think, if we had some instructions on how to do it and, should it require the ROMs to be taken out and put into some ROM reader of sorts, info about that too. If there is reasonably cheap hardware that we could get for the job, or if it's possible to put something together with some wires and suchlike, he could certainly do it. Although my brain is blonde, his isn't and he is handy with a soldering iron, but he's not looked at this kind of thing before so we do need instructions if someone is willing to provide them.

Curt Coder, having taken a long look at the photo myself now, I confess it looks to me also as if the chips above the ROM0, ROM1 etc are sitting in sockets as opposed to the RAM0 etc chips below them. I'm a bit puzzled that ROM4 has a label stuck on it. The main board in this machine hasn't been touched. All that we have done to the machine is to add the internal expansion board, and we have changed the battery pack for a home-made one. When I say "we", my husband did the work while I held things.

Tomas K, thanks for the links! I hadn't found that pdf before, so have grabbed it now. I've seen the electrickery site, it shows the external expansion which does enlarge the machine a lot, so you can see why we went for the enthusiast's internal expansion. The vintage-computer page shows the white version of the computer, I think; mine is the silver-coloured one.

Carolyn

Editing to say, looking at the Inside picture on the electrickery site, I see that the ROM I have with the paper stick-on is apparently an "option" ROM. I have no idea what the option was though!

Carolyn: Yes indeed, the one with the sticker is the option ROM.

Thomas, Ah! Thanks. Now I half-remember, we did buy a word processor after we got back to the UK, one which we could never get to work. I didn't recall that it was on a chip, but that must have been it.

Carolyn

the basic r0 roms are needed, i think only some mixture of basic rev0 and rev1 are currently dumped, while yours seems to have a pure rev0 set.

LN

Lord Nightmare, okay, thanks. So would it help if I could send to the PC from the HX-20 the results of a memory dump routine which starts at hex 8000 and finishes at FFFF?

This site http://home.arcor.de/magnos/ccg/introccg.html

has "dump.bas" which dumps stuff from memory locations to the com port, and "grab.c" for the PC side. Grab.c is obviously source code, and for Linux, which is where my brain collapses into a heap of goo. There is also a tantalising "Roms.bas" which would let me dump the roms to the machine's microcasette, but I do not know how I would then get the data from the microcasette to the PC.

I am very willing, but a bit stuck, and some advice would be hugely appreciated.

Carolyn

Edited to say, I have no problem, obviously, with running the .bas programs on the hx-20. It's what happens next, how to get it to the PC, which is my difficulty.

I once built a very basic "ghetto-style" EPROM reader on a prototype breadboard (the white ones, where you can simply stick ICs and components in). It used only 3 or 4 74xx chips and could be connected to the parallel port of a PC.

If I find the schematic I can post it so that you can build one. It took me only a few hours to design+build (including looking for the parts) so it definitely qualifies as "easy"

I also have the source code for the dumping program somewhere so you could use that, too.

-Darkstar