Like the remainder of us, 8-bit {hardware} shouldn’t be getting any newer, and failed ROMs are only a truth of life. In fact you may’t name up Commadore company for substitute elements anymore, so one thing is required. [Peirs Rocks] wasn’t glad with the prevailing choices, so he got here up with the Software program Outlined Retro ROM to function a drop-in substitute for 2364, 2332, and 2316 ROM chips.
Bodily, the Software program Outlined Retro ROM is a PCB that matches the footprint of the unique ROM chip, and holds an STM32F4 household microcontroller with various additional pins going through upwards. A few of these pins are for programming, so you may flash the board in-situ with out eradicating it from the system utilizing a Pi Pico. The others pins are jumpers for picture choice or chip configuration. Relying which STM32 you employ, you may have upto 16 ROM pictures on the board, at no matter chip choose behaviour you require. The ROM’s chip choose traces might be configured on the manufacturing unit to reply to HIGH or LOW, and this board can deal with both with a jumper swap.
The documentation on the GitHub could be very nicely executed, for which we applaud [Piers]. Directions and demos are additionally out there within the video embedded under. We may actually see this hack turning into standard within the retrocomputer group, particularly as every thing ages and recollections proceed to, uh, y’know. What have been we speaking about, once more?
Oh, proper, ROMs. You may assume an masks ROM would final a really very long time, nevertheless it’s been a really very long time since a few of these have been made. Greatest to dump them whilst you nonetheless can. If the chip is actually far gone electrically, you may attempt decoding {a photograph} of the die.
