Does anyone have an ALS Smarterm II (80 column card)? I'd like to ask a favor, I need a copy of the EPROM contents. I have a card that seems to have a corrupt 2716. It never reads the same contents... The card is a clone of the ALS card, best I can tell. I cannot find this EPROM, just the manuals for the ALS. Card looks like this:
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I do not have such a card. To clarify, the EPROM reads differently each time in a device programmer, or when you dump its address range in the Apple II monitor?
That's a good question, since the symptom of "not reading the same" can also be caused by a faulty
74LS02or74LS86.Most 80-column cards require those two chips to activate the EPROM. If one of them is faulty, then the EPROM won't activate and the listing will only see random-ish bytes echoed from the video generator. (Often the space character,
A0.) This exact problem arose in an earlier thread about a Videx 80-column card that seemed to have a bad EPROM, but it really had a bad TTL chip...I don't remember which one.It is an interesting situation that I too have trouble reading this ROM.
On my ALS card my modern (well it may be on the fritz) Stager VS4800 does not like that ROM, but it doesn't seem to like 2716 chips in general.
So, I resort to my old faithful, a slot card based EPROM reader/burner in my Apple II.
It also had issues reading the ROM reliably, getting slightly different reads each time. As the chip warmed up a bit those reads became more consistent, so I did a read, compared it successfully a number of times between the buffer and the chip, and saved it to disk, while also burning another 2716 for good measure.
Anyway, I have two separate reads of the chip, and I believe both are the same.
The binary files are included here.
I've been attempting using an XGecu burner, good point about the ROM monitor. Should also then test that... any idea where abouts I should read using the monitor?
All the 74xx I already tested with the same XGecu, and seem good (but also aware that it's not 100% definitive). Tested by replacement the video controller. Same with the 3 transistors (3906). Only items not tested are the SMC CRT Video chip and RAM.
Main issue is that I get no video at all but the ][ seems to book in DOS and is obviously working w/o video.
Thank you all and spcially Baldrick for the ROM BIN. I burned to a NEC 2716 that I know works, and I'm able to read it consistently on the XGecu. The Smarterm clone is working now, switching to 80 columns.