I have a French Clone Apple II (VELA) and I want to duplicate the ROMs.
There are 3 ROMS: ROM 1 and 2 are 2332 and ROM3 is a 2716. With the t56 xgecu programmer, I was able to read the ROM3 (2716) but could not read 2332 ROMs even converting them to 2732. So I'm looking for another method under the Apple monitor to copy them. I found this:
CALL-151
4100<C100.FFFFM
BSAVE NAMETOSAVE,A$4100,L$3F00 ==> where is this saved?
But that doesn't work ... does anyone have an idea? Thank you.
It saves it to disk, if you have one. Post the file...
I plugged in a floppy drive, but after BSAVE command it won't work...
You booted DOS 3.3 disk first?
Oh no ! I use prompt just after boot.
Yes Done !!!! With dos 3.3 is good :) Thank you very much
It looks like this clone would work great with ROMX. Then you could switch between your firmware and the original Apple II and Apple II+ firmware. Along with many others!
... it's one of the generic Taiwan made Apple-II clones from the mid 1980's. I happen to have a 'brother' of this type of clone from 1985 which has 2716 EPROMs, see these photos:
PDRM2000.JPG
PDRM2001.JPG
I am very interested in preserving the EPROM contents of such clones and comparing them to each other and to the originals from Apple.
I think the best way to extract the information if you can't read the EPROMs with a programmer is to make an audio file using the Apple-II monitor program and send this audio file to me... I can convert it back to binary if it is an AIFF file.
The reason behind using the cassette interface is that no daughter cards and no floppy disk drives nor any other possibly decrepit and marginally functional ~40 years old hardware is needed. The only thing you need is some notebook computer and an audio cable with 3.5mm plug on both ends. (the TAPE OUT outlet is in the middle, next to the video output). You can use any cable, MONO or STEREO, to record, but never try to play back into the Apple using such a factory made cable (one of the stereo outputs on the notebook could get shorted).
If you want to go that route, please shoot me a personal message via the Applefritter message system, and we will work it out !
- Uncle Bernie
Your clone and jeff34's clone are not the same. Look at yours - it has a prototyping area to the left of the memory chips whereas his doesn't. But jeff34's is probably Taiwanese as well.
I think you might be quite disappointed when you gather and compare your collection of Taiwanese ROM dumps.
99.99% of these Taiwanese clones have a 100% copy of Appesoft on the D0, D8, E0, E8 and F0 ROMs, with an F8 ROM that has minimal changes - typically the changes are a switch from the boot string "APPLE ][" to another string of 8 characters (I've seen "HI THERE", "COMPUTER", for instance), and a lower case mod on the F8 ROM.
The biggest change on Taiwanese clones is a switch from six 2716 chips to three 2732 chips with the requisite motherboard mods (100% of the clone boards I've seen from Taiwan have triangle-cut and circle-bridge pads on the motherboard for such changes).
In fact, your board in the photo is either a true Taiwanese "Unitron" motherboard or a copy of the Unitron. The giveaway is the prototyping area to the left of the RAM banks. There's a second protoyping area near the speaker connector, I'll bet.
Thanks UncleBernie and baldrick !!
So VELA is a strange Taiwanese clones .. Because it have one 2716 (ROM3, 2ko) and two 2332 (ROM1/ROM2, 4k) .
I have a BIN file of the 2716 (ROM3). I managed to recover all of the ROMs (1,2 and 3) in a BIN file.
It remains to find the exact blocks for ROM1 and ROM3, then to burn them on a 2732 (a modification will certainly be necessary at the level of the ROM support) ...
In attachment, the BIN file of ROM3 and the complete BIN of ROM1,2 and 3