BobTop
pablo_marx@BobTop Annoyingly I have two Getting Started cards that no Newton can read and when I attempt to read them on a card reader I made, it seems like they have some stuck bits. I'll poke around with them more and see if I can tweak the timing or pull-ups / pull-downs to get better results.
@pablo_marx As far as I understand, the dumps were made using exactly the same device as yours, in xxx.pccard format. But I can't figure out what's inside.))) Your Newton 1.xx PDA had a lot of software that only worked on Newton 2.xx PDAs.
@BobTop I tweaked a lot of things and still can't get a good read from Getting Started. Bit 0 is almost always stuck and bit 15 very often is. I cracked the card open hoping maybe there was just some corrosion on the legs of ROM, but discovered a chip on board epoxy blob. I could try decapping it in a month or two.
I bought a Fortune 500 card off eBay and read/dumped it without a problem. I need to do some more sanity checks with it, but I'll get it uploaded in the next couple of days.
@pablo_marx This is wonderful, I hope everything works out for you.
@pablo_marx Is there any progress in this?
@BobTop I was trying to get it to work in Einstein since the card worked fine in my MP2100 (and this seemed far easier than writing PCMCIA support for Leibniz). Einstein itself doesn't like its CIS data - I can get around that by just making a pccard file in a hex editor. NewtonOS in Einstein doesn't like that though, and I've been trying to figure out if its an issue in my handcrafted pccard file or a shortcoming in Einstein (seems unlikely as there isn't much difference to a flash card).
@BobTop I've gone ahead and uploaded the raw dump to: https://archive.org/download/AppleNewtonROMs/Fortune%20500%20-%201993%20Guide%20to%20American%20Business.bin
Superficially things seem fine - see expected WALY, DiskSoup, etc. Rest of it looks like what I'd expect out of a soup (based on having written a parser for the soups in ROM).
@BobTop And I should note, the card doesn't seem to care about REG#: Whether or not I assert it, the CIS data is always there, followed by the card data. Ideally it should only return the CIS data when REG# is asserted, and the read would be handled in 8-bit. Given the cards behavior, this is a raw dump of the 2MB space with REG# de-asserted: So every other byte of the first 4096 bytes would need to be removed (to match the expected 8-bit) and then 2048 bytes of 0x00 appended.
@BobTop I'll add that the CIS data that is there, while scant, seems valid. The card is 2MB, and "NewtOS" makes sense as the vendor.
@BobTop I got the pccard working in Einstein and have uploaded it to: https://archive.org/download/AppleNewtonROMs/Fortune%20500%20-%201993%20Guide%20to%20American%20Business.pccard
@pablo_marx This is great. It's a book. The emulator developer said you can extract pkg files from a dump using NCX.
@pablo_marx How about a Getting Started memory card dump?
NewtonTalk@pablo_marx @BobTop Wowzers!
@pablo_marx Only Columbos remains
@BobTop if I ever come across the card at a reasonable price I will buy it and dump it.
@BobTop also I started working on getting pcmcia support in Leibniz. NewtonOS recognizes the cards when they’re inserted but fails when activating the packages. I have a suspicion as to what’s causing that, but I wont be able to dive in further until June.
@pablo_marx Please make a version for Windows. Preferably Windows 7)))
@pablo_marx Would you like to write a manual on how to create a PCMCIA dump for those who have never done this before, step-by-step instructions?
@splorp Funny thing about this, I made this card reader for you - initially it was just to dump the half-length ROM cards that the Newtons used (e.g. your Cadillac), but then I figured I could make it dual-use for PCMCIA. Really need to finish the computer-side software for it... one of these days.
Until then, enjoy this picture of it reading one of the two ROM cards from a Lindy (NewtonOS build 803AS.00 aka 2.0a6).
@splorp And because I'm really good at distracting/preventing myself from finishing things, I figured whats the fun in just dumping those old ROM cards – wouldn't it be great to make new ROM cards? And then use the reader to write to them? So here's my custom made Newton ROM card, presumably the first one made in ~ 27 years.
Grant Hutchinson@pablo_marx I love the work you’ve put into this. One day, I hope I can put something like it to good use.