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Re: MOATES -- FYI

Posted: 2023 Jan 19, 21:00
by J-man
I finally got a used Quarter horse, I had to buy it from a guy in Texas and send PayPal and trust him to send it. I was thinking for sure I was about to loose 250 bucks but it arrived.

So although I appreciate the offer of pictures for that I’ve now got one of those in hand.

Thank you
J.W.S.

Re: MOATES -- FYI

Posted: 2023 Jan 25, 12:14
by J-man
Some success maybe, having some fun either way. I'm really more interested in the GUFx EECIVs but didn't want to chance hurting one of these and so the 1995ish v6 mustang EECV PLX3 is offered as the sacrifice to the EEC GODS. This is a two bank EECV and I'm confused about the banks and read a bunch of Decipha's info here on this forum but still don't quite understand.

The hardware I've kludged up in these pictures is my best attempt of what I think was called EECsukaJR or maybe Son of EecSucka. It's using Andrew March drawing revision 5.01 titled EECSUKA II EECV. I'm using WIN98SE on an old Pentium3 1G computer with a built in parallel port (This is being done with standard LPT (not bi-directional). I'm using a program written by Craig Motes called SUCKIT.exe that reads for all four banks each getting their own output file. I would love it if anyone can help me determine if my reads are working. I'm using an old hexeditor called Hxd on the old WIN98 box and looked through the BIN files.

Bank 0 reads out all zeros from $0 to $FFFF
Bank 1 starts with zeros then at $2000 it has 27, FE, 0C, A0, E5 and other data including a bunch of $FF in blocks and $80 in block near the end.
Bank 1 also has promising looking info in the ASCII just before the weird block near the end CDAN4PX.HEX and Copyright Ford Motor Co. ends at $FFFF
Bank 8 starts with FF, 3E, 0F, 20, 03 and has other data all the way to $FFFF
Bank 9 same as bank 0 it reads out all zeros from $0 to $FFFF

The beginnings of Bank 1 and Bank 8 don't match up with what Decipha has in one of his writeups so I concerned if this is a good read????

Can anyone verify my read? Can anyone explain the reasons behind Bank numbering 0,1,8,9? Should be in a different thread I'm gettin way out in weeds here, please let me know but since this is a sub-category of Moates support, I thought maybe here is ok.

Thank you
J.W.S.

Reminder: Attached BIN files are form CDAN4 EECV calibration PLX3

Re: MOATES -- FYI

Posted: 2023 Jan 25, 12:25
by decipha
You can verify it

toss the qh on it and read it then compare

Re: MOATES -- FYI

Posted: 2023 Jan 25, 12:40
by J-man
Thanks Decipha!

I soldered all of those wires right onto the J3 but if nobody has the PLX3 handy that is exactly what I'll do. I have BE but I'm thinking I'll have to get TunerPro RT in order to use the QH to read out a file. Not sure BE supports this?? Can BE show the HEX file, that would be nice too?

Thank you
J.W.S.

Re: MOATES -- FYI

Posted: 2023 Jan 25, 14:43
by efloth
Only Dump-A-8.bin has data (Garbage not a useable bin). The others are just zeros. Download this tool to help: Just drag your file onto the EXE to disassemble. It will tell you in the txt file that generates if you have a bad bin.

https://github.com/tvrfan/EEC-IV-disass ... 407_16.exe

Re: MOATES -- FYI

Posted: 2023 Jan 25, 14:46
by sailorbob
Your PLX3 read is corrupted.

Re: MOATES -- FYI

Posted: 2023 Jan 25, 16:27
by J-man
Thank you guys I'll do some more checking and try that disassembler as well as compare with the BIN file from sailorbob. I think the corruption may be level matching to the MBUS because I used 74HC157 instead of 74LS157. I've seen the different EECsucka designs going back and forth between LS and HC chips. Also,inthe different designs I've studied the MB0-MB7 sometimes get pull up or sometimes pull-down resistors. I've thought some more about the Bank numbering and seeing the bank selecting BS-0 and BS-3 on the J3port I'm wondering why no BS-1 or BS-2 that seems weird. But if I think of BS-0 thru BS-4 like a 4bit binary number then BS-0 would be the 1s and BS-3 would be the 8s. All possible combinations of only these two lines being on and off would give us Banks 0,1,8, and 9. Why would Ford do this or are banks 2 thru 7 inside the RAM or ???

Thank you
J.W.S.

Re: MOATES -- FYI

Posted: 2023 Jan 26, 07:00
by jsa

Re: MOATES -- FYI

Posted: 2023 Jan 27, 23:59
by J-man
More good progress, I now have my bread board ECCSUCKA using a 74LS157 and found with 4.7K pull downs on MB0-7 I'm getting consistent good reads. I also changed the circuit some. The ECCSUCKA design I was following had MB5 not pulled down and instead going through a 10kohm resistor and to pin2 of the latch chip 74HC373. I read a detailed narrative on an Andrew March web page from the year 2000 that explained loading $20 and $00 into the EEC. My changes include disconnecting the MB5 from the latch and pulling it down like all the other MBUS lines.

Quote from an Andrew March web page
"The hardware design of the dumper is a little bit sneaky. Notice that initialising the Slave Program Counter involves writing either the value 0x00 or 0x20 on to the MBUS at various times. In other words, the dumper only has to control just one bit (MB5) to generate these two values. This is achieved by a single latch output that sets the value of MB5 via a 10K resistor while the remaining bits (MB0-4, 6, 7) are held at logic zero by pulling them down through 10K resistors."

So far, I'm concluding that the "EECSUCKA II EEC ROM DUMPER revison 5.01" that I have built is not the correct design that Craig Motes was using when he wrote his QuickBasic SUCKIT.EXE program that I'm trying to use. Like I mentioned above I also had to pull down a little harder on the MB0-MB7 lines by going to 4.7K pulldown instead or the 10K. The SUCKIT program reads for the full 64K for each bank and outputs 4 separate files one per bank. I've learned a new word (Concatenate) that simply means to link or chain the HEX files together and then I get a 256K file. I found on Decipha's disassembly write up page the instructions for getting this back down to the 112KB it should be.

It helped having the real PLX3.bin file from sailorbob to understand what I was cutting out of the file to make it a good 2 Bank 112K file. I also found a shortcut that works because I'm getting 2 completely blank 64K banks filled with 00s why add those in to just have to cut them back out. Banks 1 and 8 are reading out with 00s from address 0 to $1FFF, the actual data starts and address $2000 with the identifiers that Decipha also mentions in his disassembly writeup (27,FE,0C,20 for Bank1 and FF,FA,E7 for Bank8). If you only concatenate banks 1 and 8 you first delete $0 to $1FFF then delete $E000 to $FFFF and your done the file should now end at $1BFFF. After the file is fixed up it has start with the bank 1 identifier at address $0 (27,FE,OC,20) and the Bank8 identifier FF,FA,E7 is at $E000 and the file ends at address $1BFFF.

I would still like to know what the skipping bank numbers is all about and why Ford did this if anyone know or has a theory.

Thank you
J.W.S.

Re: MOATES -- FYI

Posted: 2023 Jan 28, 06:36
by sailorbob
Craig's 'Suckit' program is written for the 'Son-of-EECSucka' design which I am guessing (I have not seen the 'Son-of-EECSucka' design) is not the same as the Andrew March 'EECSucka' variants.

If you are looking to improve the design then something these basic parallel port ROM dumper designs don't seem to allow for is that the MBUS should be tri-stated whenever the DI is to be changed.