Dumping "AMX Design" rom (32k board with PAL)

[jms2]

I recently asked forum member Yrrah2 (owner of the website mybbcmaster.nl, a repository of a lot of excellent AMX mouse material) whether he could image the disk which goes with the CAD package AMX Design, because I have the ROM but apparently the disc is required as well. He has very kindly imaged the disk (which I'm sure will go on his website soon), but he has asked me if I could dump the rom.

I'd be happy to, of course, but I'm not totally sure how to go about it because it's one of those 32k roms with a PAL built into a carrier board. I actually thought someone had dumped it already because a copy can be found online, but its only a 16k image, so presumably it doesn't work?

Anyway, assuming it's possible to *SRSAVE the "first" rom, I think that leaves two problems:

1) How to persuade it to page in the other 16k, so that I can save it.
2) How to actually use these roms (in an emulator, or a real machine).

Problem 2 is something that can be addressed in future, so I don't need to worry about it now. Does anyone know if there's an established method to tackle the paging question though?

[growntree]

Does *roms show it as two roms or just one? If two, I'm guessing you could just *srsave them both separately and then join them back up afterwards.

[iainfm]

I'm totally guessing here, but presumably it somehow writes to a memory address that toggles an address line or something that makes the other half of the rom active.

It might be easiest to dump it with an eprom programmer. The Morley v2 one I have can read/write the upper/lower halves of a 32k rom, for example.

[Pernod]

I recently asked forum member Yrrah2 (owner of the website mybbcmaster.nl, a repository of a lot of excellent AMX mouse material) whether he could image the disk which goes with the CAD package AMX Design, because I have the ROM but apparently the disc is required as well. He has very kindly imaged the disk (which I'm sure will go on his website soon), but he has asked me if I could dump the rom.

The only way to dump the ROM is to remove it from the carrier board and read it in a programmer, it's impossible to read in a machine with it's carrier board due to the way the 16K banks are switched.

The AMX Design ROM has been previously dumped and can be found in the collection at viewtopic.php?p=218919#p218919. The topic suggests I've been waiting for a floppy image for over 5 years now!

MAME is currently the only emulator capable of handling the AMX Design ROM but hasn't been tested as I don't yet have the required floppy image, so looking forward to seeing this.

[jms2]

Excellent - I had found that thread previously but I forgot that it contained the full rom. I will point yrrah2 towards it.

I do have the disc image now but it seems only polite to let him premiere it!

[Pernod]

Excellent - I had found that thread previously but I forgot that it contained the full rom. I will point yrrah2 towards it.

I do have the disc image now but it seems only polite to let him premiere it!

You should post it to your other topic at viewtopic.php?t=27035 so it can easily be found.

For anyone wanting to use a copy of the AMX Design ROM on real hardware would require the carrier board. Fortunately the PAL used on the carrier board is the same as used with Inter-Word, which seem quite plentiful in supply. So grab a cheap Inter-Word and swap the ROM for a copy of AMX Design and should work.

[jms2]

At some point soon I'll try out my (well, the museum's) complete setup and report back on whether it works.