Wanted: StarWriter 30 demo/tutorial disk image

[hjalfi]

I've just acquired from my local shop-which-sells-things-that-other-people-have-thrown-away a Canon StarWriter 30 word processor / typewriter. It's a remarkably interesting thing, with a DD 3.5" floppy disk drive, high-resolution thermal printer, 64kB of RAM and LCD. The whole thing is powered by a bespoke Canon LSI chip about which I can find no information, but dumping the 1MB ROM shows it's a TLCS-90 (a rather uncommon Z80 variant with redesigned instruction set and 16-bit operations).

It all works fine, or at least it does once I replaced the belt in the FDD, but one of the startup messages refers to a demo/tutorial disk. Chances are this contains executables for running the shop display attract mode. If I can get my hands on one, I might be able to reverse engineer it and get my own code running on the machine. (I've successfully done this with Brother word processors.) Does anyone happen to have one and would be willing to image it and send me a copy of the contents? I don't need a real physical floppy, as I can make one myself from the image.

Thanks!

 

[Zenith]

Hi, did you upload that rom somwhere or would you be willing to share it?
I should have bought a new eepromrw a long time ago. :/

Would be a great jumpstart.
The maskrom on mine says: nh8-4260
Datecode: 9409

 

[Zenith]

For those who it may concern, I got a new reader and uploaded the ROM contents to archive.org

 

[powerlot]

(I've successfully done this with Brother word processors.)

May I ask how you did this? I recently aquired a Brother WP and would be interested...

BTW there's a disk image here: https://archive.org/details/Canon-StarWriter-30-demonstration-FancyHeadlines

 

[Zenith]

May I ask how you did this?

Very good question, I've been doing some analysis of the ROM and the floppy you're referencing. I have mine disassembled because I'm reverse engineering the pcb so I can't verify for sure, so take it with grain of salt. But here are my 5 cents worth of knowledge. For analysis I've mainly been using cpu_rec with 8051 and STM8 removed from the corpus so it doesn't throw to much false positives because of the lack of denoice'ing.

The PRG files on the diskette are the only files with TLCS-90 opcodes.
Everything else I know about the disk format comes from here: https://github.com/rtaylor187/CanonTxtCvt

Funny enough, I often use a saying that translates to "measuring is knowing", so I was making sure it was indeed TLCS-90 since it's hard to statically detect (especially fringe) architectures from pure binary. Still curious how he did it. But I forgot about the diskette till I read your comment, and go figure, the (V021).INF file literally says ... TLCS-90.