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Lisa QuickBoot ROM

NeXT

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 22, 2008
Messages
8,095
Location
Kamloops, BC, Canada
There's no way I'm paying $190 for a ROM (or two?) and the code within.
I can find absolutely no information that goes in dept about the ROM upgrade besides it allowed the Sun Remarketing SCSI cards to be bootable and that someone on ebay has always been selling upgrade kits for an obscene amount. I've never seen any information about what chips it used or if someone had dumped the ROM image and made it public.

-dammit- -dammit-
-dammit-

I dealt with the guy before when I asked for just the generic ROM image (because the cards are totally useless without a ROM) and he literally sent me an empty bin file and stopped responding to my email.
 
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Next,
thanks for pulling those photos.
Rick
 
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Next,
You won't pay $190 for a ROM, yet you will gladly Pirate it the same way you used my photos in your post without permission. Quickboot is a still a commercial product and it's developer (who also lives in Canada) depends on the income from it's sale. BTW, the standard SUN SCSI ROM is blank (all zeros). Please remove my photos from your post.
Rick

Right. For starters you should consider using anti-hotlinking if you don't want people using your work. Otherwise it's very hard to describe the odd piggyback arrangement when you seem to own all the known images of the kit. How else am I to even ask for use? You won't even answer your damn email.
Your wish has also been granted.
Second, in the vintage computer world we've copied, duplicated, dumped reflashed and otherwise replicated and distributed hundreds if not thousands of assorted ROMs, system bootstraps, solid-state applications and microcode level components, many of which are also under copyright from every company from Apple to Zenith but otherwise nobody has ever seeked legal action on someone replicating a chip for repairing another system. Commodore mask Roms, TOS upgrades, hell, even ROM dumps from Apple systems.

Yet when someone wants to burn this particular ROM themself to save money (I love my Lisa, but I love my education more) someone (I'm assuming you're the seller of the ROM kit and pardon me if you're not) jumps out of the corner of the internet to scream FOUL because they're being undercut by someone who isn't completely stupid.
You don't want me to keep asking? Very well, I'll stop after this post but if you're going to try and nail me to the wall for a ROM image request you better also tell the VCF admin team that the discussion, copying and distribution of ANY ROM images is no longer allowed because making one chip the exception is an absolute load of crap. Why is the developer even still trying to make money on the upgrade? Nobody has used a Lisa for a daily driver in almost 20 years. All that is left is people who just want a bit of extra functionality. Did it sell so poorly he's still trying to break even?

[/rant]
 
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it sounds like this rick character may just be a douchebag, they are out there. But he may be right, especially if he's been paying copyrights for the past 25+ years on a bit of code that hasn't even seen light of day for decades. What i don't get is why he would accuse you of piracy when all you were trying to do is get something to work. You have to remember, not even microsoft cares about things like their windows up to 3.11 getting shared around anymore, not piracy anymore, abandonware. BUT back to this guy, i find it amusing that he makes an account just to say thanks for removing his images, how do we know they are his? How do we know he's not some guy that BOUGHT the copyrights just to sell the code because he knows that there are a FEW people who will need it? Suspicious on his end indeed.

Like i said, the nerve of some people.....
 
BuMP.

I'm still being told "don't even try or else", but at least I now have much higher resolution photographs of the hardware.

CGS_7955.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer related/LisaQuickboot ROM/CGS_7955.jpg

CGS_7954.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer related/LisaQuickboot ROM/CGS_7954.jpg

CGS_7953.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer related/LisaQuickboot ROM/CGS_7953.jpg

the QuickBoot upgrade consists of the EPROM, plus a GAL20V8S-25HB1 strapped on top for good measure.
 
What is the GAL even used for? Most of it is tied to ground, and the datasheet for it makes it look like some sort of mux with xor'd output or something.

I would just dump the EPROM and reverse engineer the code, then re-implement whatever the GAL is doing with a PIC or Arduino. It's not copyright infringement if you use none of the original code.
 
Lisa QuickBoot ROM - info and history

Lisa QuickBoot ROM - info and history

It's great there is still a little interest in the Lisa SCSI QuickBoot upgrade.

Attempting to address some of the questions and speculation:

The original Lisa SCSI card was developed around 1989 by Sun Remarketing (now defunct), not Apple Computer Inc.

Sun Remarketing had a lot of Apple's Lisa computers to liquidate. To sell more of them, they developed the SCSI card and MacWorks Plus to make the Lisa closer to the Macintosh Plus in capability.

The original SCSI board's ROM (as sold with the card) contains only an ID word to identify the type of card ($00 $1B as the first two bytes). The rest of that 2716 EPROM is unused/zeros.

The Lisa's CPU board ROM predates the SCSI card, and has no ability to use it. So to use the SCSI card with the original codeless SCSI board ROM, one would cold boot MacWorks Plus or MacWorks Plus II from either a parallel port hard disk (eg. ProFile), or a floppy disk. Once MW+/II is loaded, it recognizes the SCSI card and the Macintosh system can be loaded from a SCSI drive (or a ProFile or floppy). Subsequent restarts of the Macintosh System usually did not require the cold boot floppy.

As ProFiles were failing rapidly, a way to boot the Lisa from a SCSI drive was desired, spurring development of what became the LSAC (Lisa SCSI Accessories Card) which includes two 28 pin ROM sockets. The LSAC's SCSI boot code fit in a 2764, and it can boot MW+/II via the SCSI card or via an XLerator board's SCSI port.

However, a 2764 won't work in the socket of the SCSI board as it has only a 24 pin socket with 11 address lines. A 2732 is 24 pins, but since the SCSI board implemented only 11 address lines, only half of a 2732 EPROM is accessible. The Lisa expansion slots do have 12 address lines.

With some further effort, the LSAC code was trimmed/optimized to fit in a 2732, and the piggyback PAL was added to implement a page switch to enable access to the entire EPROM without modifying the board. That became the user-installable QuickBoot product released in 1992.

Since the Lisa ROM has no knowledge of SCSI or a Macintosh hard disk, code to cold boot from a SCSI drive requires implementing SCSI, and navigating the Macintosh File System to locate and load MW+/II on the SCSI drive -- that's what the LSAC/QuickBoot code does.

The SCSI card is functional without QuickBoot. QuickBoot adds the ability to cold boot MW+/II from a SCSI drive to avoid using a floppy or ProFile.

QuickBoot was not developed by Sun Remarketing, and so the effort to develop the code wasn't subsidized by sales of the SCSI card and the Lisas they were sold in. Purchase of a Lisa SCSI card didn't include a license for QuickBoot, they are separate products from different companies.

QuickBoot wasn't developed until the Lisa was substantially obsolete, and the buyers are limited to Lisa enthusiasts that want to run MW+/II. This is a small market and since QuickBoot is not a requirement to use a Lisa with the SCSI card and MW+/II, the market is smaller still.

Lisa QuickBoot is not abandonware (as of May 2018, at least). I presume Lisa enthusiasts pay to add this feature and aren't eager to distribute it freely because they still want to encourage support and potential new development for the Lisa platform.

Disclosure: As the author of the QuickBoot code, I derive financial benefit and personal satisfaction from sales of this product, as minimal as they may be.
 
I will restate if it was not updated in the earlier portion of this thread that reverse engineering or cloning of the QuickBoot upgrade is NOT being performed and will not be as per your repeated requests. I AM however making available higher resolution photographs of the upgrade as there are none larger than 320x240 available on the internet.
 
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