• Externally accessing the doc (diskonchip)

    Paco • 04/02/2021 at 10:15 • 0 comments

    The unit uses a DiskOnChip MD2800 as main storage, at 8 MiB there isn't much one can install on it but without another option this was my first attempt.

    Sacrificing an old ISA card I built my custom board to attach the md2800 to an old computer to see if I can write something to it.

    I cut all the traces used by the ISA board and soldered wires to my custom board.

    The altera epm7128 implements an address decoder so the chip is placed at address 0xD0000.

    With this plugged in an old computer diskonchip bios extension were installed at every boot and I managed to access the diskonchip using the vendor tools and format it but random errors keep appearing and finally I had to move on to explore another options.