[NTLK] Fun with Flash

[Matthias Melcher]

At the last Wonk, we talked about emulating Flash cards. Of course, I was intrigued, and what was supposed to be an hour or two of tinkering with Einstein became a whole day of in-depth fun with - hold your breath - my *physical* Newton. Yes, I dug deep into my storage boxes and unearthed my MP2100 and a surprisingly large stack of PCMCIA cards that accumulated over the years.

I installed NewtsBug and Hammer, the lowest low level debugger on the MP and Basilisk, hooked up a USB-C to USB-A adapter to a USB-A to 9-pin serial adapter to a 9-pin to DIN adapter, and a DIN to Newton dongle - easy as π - and already I could dump Newton memory.

My plan was to find the PCMCIA raw data and the CIS, the card information structure, dump the to Basilisk, copy them to the Mac, convert them to a C data structure, and import them into Einstein. More π. I did not manage the last step yet, but I did discover two things, and I wanted to write about them.

Discovery 1: PCMCIA cards can have a 32-bit bus. Sounds boring? But no, it is not. That means that we can write an app that stores a regular Newton ROM on a 8MB PC-Card, and map that new ROM where the original ROM is located. That trick would make the clone of the original ROM writable! We can fool around in the ROM, fix bugs, change stuff, add files, without ever opening the case. Sweet!

Discovery 2: I picked up 8 or so flash cards over the years, stuffing them away in a box, but never really looked at them. Well, dumping the content of the first card I found, I suddenly saw familiar names inside the raw machine code. Well, Andrea, could be anyone. But wait, Björn? What are thos German names doing here? Well, you guessed it. This was *my* original card from my very first PDA, and it contained tons of names I had long forgotten, addresses that are hopelessly outdated, some great memories, but also some names of friends who have long passed. Wow! And sigh!

I have stacks of media, floppy disks, dat tapes, SyQuests, even Sinclair Microdrive cartridges, but this was somehow a very unexpected blast from the past. First of all, PDAs keep record of much more personal data than some floppy disks, but secondly, the data is still there and readable! All of my VHS demagnetized years ago, the dat tapes stretched or shrank, the SyQuests insist on a PC with a parallel printer port (LOL), but the PCMCIAa are still fine. Amazing.

 - Matthias

PS: the only other completely undamaged ancient media are my Lollos, the rolls of punch hole paper strips from our Telex.