22nd July 2020

Alive! Tested the pre-production ROM X PCB as well as the 2316B text ROM.

I couldn't find my 6 pin IDC headers so used a 10 pin cable temporarily. Production boards will use a black 6-way cable, so will blend in much better.

Here's the on-screen boot menu - this is displayed at initial power up, and you can adjust the amount of time it is displayed before it boots the default ROM. The delay can be 0 seconds, however you'd then need to use the disk utility to change anything. Yes, there is a disk utility, which is essentially a copy of the boot menu code that can be BRUN. While the menu is displayed, you can press a key 1-F to immediately boot that ROM image :

ROM X 2316B SPCL is also installed and linked via the ROM-Link interface :

I've flashed this chip with 4 fonts - Regular, Lower Case, Pig Font, and J Plus.

A quick demo of the Pig Font ROM :

Note that there is a version of the ROM X Text ROM for pre Rev 7 motherboards as well - a 2513 replacement. This is still in progress and may consist of 2 separate PCB's which will upgrade the text capability of a pre Rev 7 motherboard to that of the Rev 7 so that the same flash images can be used for both versions. Whilst ROM X is programmable in-system, the text ROM is not. It is reprogrammable, but would require a programmer plus adapter PCB - thus I'd like to nail down the list of ROM's that it contains so I can pre-program the chips and cover off all bases. If you have any text ROM suggestions (or even better, the binary files) then please send them to me - deanclaxton at gmail dot com. Cheers!

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