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I imaged the ~300 Rainbow disks that I have using kyroflux, but that's extra hardware (and one reason I have the images as raw, physical order disks).

https://bitbucket.org/ArmstrongJ/rbimg/src/master/ has an option to read floppy disks to the hard drive... I can get you binaries to give to this person...

But then you have to transfer them from the Rainbow elsewhere, but kermit and/or xmodem are well supported by the rainbow (xmodem is faster, but kermit is more reliable). The biggest issue I have getting data off my rainbow is that its serial ports have issues going faster than 200-300 CPS (at least under Venix which I've been running most lately).

There's also media master that runs on the Rainbow, but I'd have to dig back down into the documentation for it. It's one of the few programs, IIRC, that can copy Lotus 123 with it's funky copy protection scheme (really just a mis-number sector on a high track)....

Where, approximately, is this person located? How many disks do they have? I still have my setup intact and can use it to image disks if necessary (but I do understand all the issues involved)... What kind of hard drive do they have? Is it setup for CP/M or MS-DOS?

I've dumped it and uploaded it to rb-100a-1.1.11a.bin but I've not tried to load it into MAME yet.

It's 24k. I used debug to copy FA00:0-FA00:5FFF to low memory and wrote it out verbatim. It has the sorts strings and instructions I'd expect in it to have when I disassemble it that are similar to the other ROMs that are available at least at first blush. while I do have a ROM dumper, I've never used it and am hesitant to remove the physical ROMs just to read them if other methods can extract the same data...

Thanks a lot! I understand why wou don't want to crack them out - but it would be great if you could just remove the Rainbow's "baking tray" and take pictures of the mainboard and cards - this would allow us to crossreference your dump with the actual chip parts.

Another potential shortcoming of this method is that debug can't reach the chargen ROM and Z80 arbitation PROMs that are in MAME's ROM definition as well.

I took several pictures, but this one is the one that came out best. The part numbers are indeed different than the other 100As. And there's a lot of rework on this board, more than I would have though would have shipped. And the green socket one of the chips is in looks funky to me....



So these are 23-090E4-011-24, 23-091E4-011-24 and 23-092E4-011-24. So this beast must be an earlier version / late prototype. I bought it from someone who told me their son got it when it first came out and he was maybe a salesman for DEC (I think he and his son had been estranged and he was tasks with disposing of his estate because he had a lot of weird stuff from the 80s). The number of rework wires (maybe 2 dozen) also suggests this isn't the final production version...


I might consider this... I half remembered the BIOS EEPROMs were funky in some way which is what put me off removing them... Now that I've opened it up again, I see why... The characters look the same, so I'd be a little hesitant there, but would consider the Z80 arbitration PROMs. Do you have a pointer to the 100A schematics? I saw them online years ago, but google only shows me the 100B ones in bitsavers... I think I found the 6308 on the 100A and I'll see if my universal programmer can read it back before undertaking to remove and dump it... (I have a photo of it too, marked

6308-IJ
8237

and

LM8318
090B1

if that helps. But the photo that it's in has 4 rework wires, including one that goes to a pin that's been lifted out of the board entirely...

I can't find A schematics at the moment either, but here's a link to a document that tells you how to convert your A to a B ... I posted this on one of the first pages of this thread, but the original link has gone stale:

https://www.magentacloud.de/lnk/aiyzLQpE

And this technical manual http://www.os2site.com/sw/DEC/rainbow/doc2/pc100tm1.pdf also seems to talk about the "A" model.

I've separated your ROM dump in its three 8K parts and preliminarily inserted them in my local MAME source ... the language part is identical to the Rainbow A ROMs we have in the driver, the emulation comes up with the other ROMs from your dump, but hangs after the printer/comm port error message ... probably the ROM patches have to be adjusted to the earlier code.

Most likely.... The quick disassembly I did show they were different, but I didn't delve...

I got brave and broke out my TJ866-CS MiniPro and tried to download the PROM since the markings are a little different than the documented markings. However, it doesn't understand the 6308 that I have. The ones listed have too many pins, etc. So I can't read it in. Any recommended gear to read this in?

Thanks for the links. I've read through all the technical manuals (and even seem to have a couple that pre-dates the ones online I need to scan in), I was hoping to recover the A schematics themselves..

Try dumping it as a signetics 82s135, it is an equivalent part to the MMI6309; this is an MMI6308 part which is open collector (vs MMI6309 which is tri-state), but as long as there's some sort of pull up resistors on the 8 output bits (and any sane device programmer should already have those), it should dump properly.

LN

Thanks Lord Nightmare for the tip.

That got me to a big list of equivalent parts. I must have a really janky programmer. There's no Signetics 82S135 (or the related 82S114N). Nor National 74S471, nor TI 28L22, nor TI 18L22, nor AMD 27S23, nor Fujitsu 7118, nor any of the equivalents for the 512x8 PROMs that different only on the chip select.

Maybe I need a better programmer/reader?

I'd get a BPMMicro BP1410 or BP1610 if you can find/afford one, otherwise if you have an older machine with a parallel port, go for a BP1200, BP1400 or BP1600 instead.

LN