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just bought this out of curiosity

from what i can see there's a XOS rom and twin SIO - all resembling the Christmas Lights' cables when you take them out of the box every December.

 

so from Pics attached can anyone identify exactly what's going on here, and more importantly - what are each of the switches intended to do?

 

post-39567-0-44032400-1450390440_thumb.jpgpost-39567-0-62773500-1450390450_thumb.jpgpost-39567-0-19314200-1450390459_thumb.jpgpost-39567-0-18304900-1450390466_thumb.jpgpost-39567-0-27511700-1450390474_thumb.jpg

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  • 3 weeks later...

Turns out a number of traces got burned up on this machine when the upgrades were fitted and the underside of the motherboard is a mess of solder and jumper wire. I did, however, desolder the EPROM from the OS ROM and dump it:

 

XOS - The Tool.bin

 

Tried running it in emulation but the reset vector points to $FFCF where it reads STRIG1 and promptly runs straight into garbage and crashes. I understand XOS is an 80 column OS, but I couldn't find another dump anywhere to compare it with. Anyone shed any light or know why it might crash?

 

EDIT: Bad dump first time (one of the legs is hanging off the 27C128). Boots now but still appears to be a corrupt image.

 

post-21964-0-32122300-1452026950_thumb.png

Edited by flashjazzcat
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This doesn't appear to be an 80-column OS, at least not what I've seen referred to as XOS/80. It has a built-in memory dumper instead. Once after boot, hit Ctrl+Shift+Tab, wait for the buzzer, then hit start. D1: will be formatted (!) and then have $03C0-BFFF dumped to disk starting at sector 1, and the following message placed on the last sector:

Sector 720 / $2D0 (128 bytes):
000: 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08-09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 |................|
010: 50 4C 45 41 53 45 20 52-45 53 50 45 43 54 20 54 |PLEASE RESPECT T|
020: 48 45 20 43 4F 50 59 52-49 47 48 54 53 20 4F 46 |HE COPYRIGHTS OF|
030: 20 41 4E 59 20 50 52 4F-47 52 41 4D 20 54 48 41 | ANY PROGRAM THA|
040: 54 20 59 4F 55 20 4D 41-59 20 42 41 43 4B 55 50 |T YOU MAY BACKUP|
050: 20 55 53 49 4E 47 20 54-48 49 53 20 44 45 56 49 | USING THIS DEVI|
060: 43 45 20 18 00 04 06 86-20 52 45 56 FF 30 31 FF |CE ..... REV.01.|
070: 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09-08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 |................|

As for the crashes, it's a hybrid OS-B/XLOS ROM. C: and P: appear to be present, but anything that uses the PBI routines will crash.

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  • 10 months later...

Turns out a number of traces got burned up on this machine when the upgrades were fitted and the underside of the motherboard is a mess of solder and jumper wire. I did, however, desolder the EPROM from the OS ROM and dump it:

 

attachicon.gifXOS - The Tool.bin

 

Tried running it in emulation but the reset vector points to $FFCF where it reads STRIG1 and promptly runs straight into garbage and crashes. I understand XOS is an 80 column OS, but I couldn't find another dump anywhere to compare it with. Anyone shed any light or know why it might crash?

 

EDIT: Bad dump first time (one of the legs is hanging off the 27C128). Boots now but still appears to be a corrupt image.

 

attachicon.gifxos.png

 

A hex editor reveals some text in the Dump: "SUPER CHIP! ©1986 COMPUTER SUPPORT (UK) LTD" - There were three versions advertised, one for 400/800, one for XL/XE and one for 130XE.

 

Given that the BB0001 version number is in the ROM, perhaps this is the XL/XE version? (Which, I've just realised may be why it's in an 800XL... D'oh!)

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  • 5 weeks later...

this could use a real close look, and a final report of exactly what all it's got, the modification switches and the XOS rom/the tool/xxxxxx combined prom. all that spaghetti and the add on may not just be reworked traces but also modifications to switch things in and out.

Edited by _The Doctor__
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