Subject: Disassembling the flash

From: "huns80" <huns80@...>
Date: Fri, 05 Nov 2004 14:44:13 -0000

I just found this group. Nearly three years ago, I teamed
up with another guy somewhere out on the net to disassemble
the flash. We both worked on it fairly intensively for a couple
of weeks before we both got distracted away from the project.

We made a lot of progress, with nearly all of the first 16k
commented and understood. We located the various application
programs as well. The one thing we never figured out, though,
was the condition necessary to make the unit enter the flash
reprogramming section.

I just went through my files and emails, but unfortunately
all the work and email correspondence got lost over the years.
All I have left is the disassembly I had prior to those weeks.
Some of our discoveries were posted to the linuxhacker mailstation
area.

BTW, the code was obviously written in C and the code for
the various libraries obvious as you delve into the source.

It's hard to believe people have been working on this for so
long and still haven't figured out how to make it enter the
bootloader.

Jeff

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From: "John R. Hogerhuis" <jhoger@...>
Date: Fri, 05 Nov 2004 08:10:49 -0800

> long and still haven't figured out how to make it enter the

Probably hard to believe because it isn't true any more ;-)

There is Pascal code that 'Cyrano Jones' wrote which can flash new code
over the parallel port. He has used it to put a debug monitor program
on.

The one thing we don't have on that score is a way to read the existing
bootloader out before overwriting it.

I just got my laplink cable out yesterday, I want to do a little hacking
on mailstation again soon. My first goal is to get a Forth system
running on it using CJs code.

Does anyone know if the CPU has a serial port? I think it would be a
cool hack to rewire the phone port (or both ports together if one wants
flow control) as a serial port. Then with an external Y cable that
connects into both and from there to a cable or adapter. This would make
the machine much more easily interfaced with other computers, and would
probably spur some interest as a portable terminal.

-- John.