New Code :-)

[Qiwei Xiao]

Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> 
> Dear OpenBIOS readers,
>
> ... 
>
> I thought about building something like an eprom simulator which can be
> plugged into the bios socket of a board and to the parallel port of
> another computer which just holds a file with the bios image. This would
> make defelopment and testing *quite* faster. Has anyone experiences with
> this or does anyone know whether there are ready, cheap solutions for
> this?
>

I have been thinking about building such eprom simulator as well. The 
circuit needs at least 10 74xx/40xx ICs to build. I can post the 
schematic if anybody is interested but I don't know if it is worth the 
effort to build such a simulator. 

The solution I am thinking of using is this:

(1) Buy an EPROM/Flash ROM writer. The cheapest I have found is around
    US$150. It can handle a ROM up to 8M of size. 

(2) Build a small board with a ZIP socket and hook it up to the EPROM 
    socket on the MB so I don't have to worry about damaging the MB when 
    insert/remove the ROM frequently.

This, although not as fast as eprom simulator, should work well. The only 
thing I am not happy with is that the EPROM writer only works on Windows.
I hate to boot up Windows for a single minute.

Another viable solution is to use devbio (thanks, Stefan). But still I 
need to build a board with two ROM sockets and a soft "switch" so that
I can boot up the PC using the good bios on one ROM, switch to the other
ROM, write the new bios image to it using devbio, reboot and test. But 
the circuit is not substantially simpler than the ROM simulator.


Cheers,
Qiwei