[sdiy] Andromeda A6 hardware questions

[cheater cheater]

On the topic of feasability of os hacking:
Neil, I'm not suprised you had so much work to do! 1992.. wow, you had
to write your own disassembler, that's an amazing amount of work just
to start. And then the compiler probably sucked real bad, too. It's
like you're mining your own clay when you want to build a house! Good
thing we have better tools now!

Reverse engineering this thing should be much easier than that;
coldfire is supported by IDA Pro and Hexrays, which could make the
work much easier; I don't know how good their support is, but what
I've seen from x86 was very good, so I can only guess it would be of
at least comparable quality. I assume the usual Coldfire tools are
very good too, since they're from Terry's company after all. I'm
contacting him via email now; he doesn't know what exact model is in
the A6, but I'm sure he'll be able to answer questions about the
toolset etc.

Also, I am looking at the haskell realtime tools right now, which let
you build hard realtime with DSLs defined in haskell, and are supposed
to be a breeze to use, if a complete rewrite is the way to go.

Finally, modifying the thing shouldn't be too difficult. The physical
communication with the VLSI should be easy to figure out *if* we can
get at the pins - it's not using gigahertz bus speeds and even very
old logical analyzers will probably be able to help us figure it out.
If not, disassembly of the image could be needed, or some other
ingenious way, I'm sure there are people here smart enough to figure
something out. Since the OS is in a ROM, it should be fairly trivial
to set up a develop-upload-test pipeline.

D.

On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 14:52, Neil Johnson <neil.johnson97 at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> cheater cheater wrote:
>> where can I read your notes on the W-30 disassembly?
>
> Here:
>
> http://www.milton.arachsys.com/nj71/index.php?menu=2&submenu=4&subsubmenu=2
>
> on the "Resources" page under "Disassemblers".  Download the "dis96" zip file and follow the instructions on the page to generate the disassembler output.
>
> Neil
> --
> http://www.njohnson.co.uk
>
>