DataRover 840F ROM Flashing Card
JET very kindly unearthed a treasure chest containing the One True ROM Image for DataRover 840s, a PC Card that will flash a 840's ROM to Magic Cap 3.1.2j. This card can be used to re-flash a 'rover with no additional hardware. (See also this article for reflashing a 'rover using the developer tools and serial cable.) You can download the ROM image from the archives page and load it to a 8MB linear flash card yourself, or if you need a pre-flashed card mailed to you, contact me.
Note: if you bought a DataRover on eBay that has pre-release Rosemary firmware (usually dated 9/1/1997), that won't work with the packages in the archive. It's best to update to 3.1.2j.
To use this card, follow these steps:
- Start with a DataRover 840 powered off
- Make sure it's plugged into the AC adapter
- Insert the flasher card into the top PC card slot
- Hold down the option key and turn on the 'rover.
- The screen will show vertical lines. (Release the option key.)
- Wait about 5 minutes. When the screen starts flashing black/white, it's done.
- Remove power, take out the card, and power on.
Comments
I didn't know the Datarover could use flash cards. what models are compatible?
Posted by: Anton Smirnov | July 12, 2006 12:07 PM
DataRover's can't actually use flash cards in the normal sense -- only SRAM. For this ROM flasher card we took advantage of the fact that you can read from linear flash as if it was a contiguous chunk of memory. (Writing to it is another matter.) We needed to use linear flash because 8MB SRAM cards didn't exist at the time.
Posted by: Josh Carter | July 13, 2006 8:07 AM
What Flash cards can the Datarover use to flash?
I coppied the .gz file onto an intel series 2+ and it was not able to flash the 'rover.
Posted by: Anton Smirnov | July 26, 2006 7:43 PM