piątek, 16 sierpnia 2013

Mysterious hardware, part 3.

So finally I have obtained an ISA-equipped PC that would be relatively new (a industrial grade P4) that allowed me to install Win XP and LabView software in order to debug the card, or at least try to do that. The motherboard was kindly donated by an elektroda.pl user and blog-reader nicknamed music. Thank you!

Using a simple LabView software I tried to write and listen to/from the cards addresses (that I know, as I can configure the 7 MSB by jumpers). It is quite easy to do that, as LabView offers InPort and OutPort commands that allow me to directly talk to the bus. As I do not believe that it can be so easy I have hooked an oscilloscope to the cards address lines and address decoder output in order to check if it's working or not. And it is.

Unfortunately I did not get any response from the card. Two options are: the card (or cards CPLD at least) is dead or that the communication protocol is more complicated. I'm in favor of the latter. For now I have no further idea what to do with this piece of hardware apart from trying to read the CPLD content. As I do not have any cable for Lattice ICs and any proof that this approach will be valuable I just put the card back on shelve. At some point maybe I will come back - to further work with it or scrap it, as there are plenty of nice and rare ICs there.

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