You can use Uniflash and any PC with a free ISA slot. It should be able to detect the ROM.

Put in your PC and save with debug.exe
You can check with
-d c800:0
if its there.

Think NSSI should also be able to save it to a file...

Thanks for the info guys.

I always forget about debug.

Do they make any clip on style attachments for the tl866ii?

Predator99 wrote on 2020-08-18, 20:04:

Put in your PC and save with debug.exe You can check with -d c800:0 if its there. […]
Show full quote

Put in your PC and save with debug.exe
You can check with
-d c800:0
if its there.

Think NSSI should also be able to save it to a file...

Be careful with that, though: If the card contains a BIOS extension (which it most likely does...), the BIOS extension is executed during POST before you get to run DEBUG. So don't do this if you don't trust the ROM contents.

Yes, you have to be careful the content of the EPROM is not modified during its execution...?

This is a 8-bit ISA card, you can put in a XT. Nothing is going to be modified.

Only thing that might happen is that a part of it is occupied by another adapter ROM. But in this case its not executed at all as the checksum does not match.

Predator99 wrote on 2020-08-19, 09:01:

Yes, you have to be careful the content of the EPROM is not modified during its execution...?

No, you have to be careful that the content of the EPROM does not do harmful stuff to your computer (like "recover" the partition table of your hard drive to a "known good state"). Or, if you are running it in an XT without a V20 processor, the EPROM may crash the POST if it uses 80186 instructions.

If you know the purpose of the EPROM, you might be sure that it does not do strange things in its initialization routine. But if this card is a random dumpster find, I would be careful with blindly executing code from it.

The eeprom updates non y2k compliant bioses. So I'm not too worried about it being malicious. But I would prefer to dump it with my tl866ii if possible. Without desoldering it from the ISA card.

Why..? The result will be excatly the same....

I also dont think the y2k update will fill the 64 kbyte of the EPROM, the ROM size will most likely be only 2 kbyte. You should check the header of the dump.

Predator99 wrote on 2020-08-19, 18:35:

Why..? The result will be excatly the same....

I also dont think the y2k update will fill the 64 kbyte of the EPROM, the ROM size will most likely be only 2 kbyte. You should check the header of the dump.

I'm an eprom flashing noob. What kind of problems will it cause if it's only 2K?

Its a waste of space 😉

WHat kind of modification are you going to do?

Install NSSI and read the content with it, seems to be most useful method for you...

Yes use NSSI or Uniflash, do not mess with DOS debug if you have never used it.

kingcake wrote on 2020-08-18, 19:12:

I've got an ISA card that contain rom extensions I wish to modify. Is there a way I can read this ROM into a file without desold […]
Show full quote

I've got an ISA card that contain rom extensions I wish to modify. Is there a way I can read this ROM into a file without desoldering it? I have a TL866II.

I am sure it can even be erased and reprogrammed to be an XT IDE card. The XTIDE bios can easily fit to the chip and since there is an option to chose the address it would surely be a very good extension card.
Any thoughts on this?

I'm pretty sure you can get a clip on adapter for your programer that way you don't have to mess with software if you don't want to.

Clip-on things are only usable for a limited amount of hardware that are explicitly made to support it. All the other chips on the board get powered and some signals such as !CE will be driven by the other chips and this will upset the programmer and in worst case causes actual damage.

Just read the chip with NSSI or some other util that can read and dump stuff from option ROM area.