By organsurgeon
Thu Sep 03, 2020 9:55 pm
Good morning!
I bought a broken MPC 2000XL a year or so ago and finally got around to trying to fix it.
I seems to have a (quite common?) corrupted flash problem. The MPC shows "Insert MPC2000XL Disk!".
Upon loading the v1.14 OS onto a USB Stick and plugging it into a GOTEK floppy emulator it tries to load the binary file but fails and shows a crash screen with a x86 register dump.
If i load the 1.20v OS it just gets stuck and endlessly shows "Loading: MPC2KXL.BIN".
I suspect the previous owner has screwed the boot sector of the internal flash chip since the BOOT BLOCK jumper was set to BOOT UNLOCK (which allows overriding the boot sector of the internal flash chip I suppose).
Now I'm thinking of trying to boot from a recovery ROM since that might be the only way to get it working again... I'm kinda poor and can't afford one of the pre-flashed recovery ROMs that are sold online so I want to flash my own using a programmer.
I researched EPROM chips and found out that I probably need a 27C040 (512KB) or 27C080 (1MB).
I don't know if the recovery image is a special OS or just a normal OS Image as can be downloaded from the AKAI website.
First Question: When booting the recovery EPROM, does it look like the normal OS or one especially made for recovery?
Second Question: Will the normal OS fit on a 512KB EPROM. It seems to be exactly 512KiB [1KiB == 1024 byte] in size, even padded with zeros to fill all the space (actually ending around address 0x0007f5cf but with the file continuing to around the address 0x0007ffff [which is also the last address of the 27C040 Chip])?
Third Question: If the recovery OS is special, does anyone have an image of it lying around? Or does anyone have a recovery EPROM lying around and could dump the data on it (ill be glad to provide instructions).
Cheers and Thank You
I bought a broken MPC 2000XL a year or so ago and finally got around to trying to fix it.
I seems to have a (quite common?) corrupted flash problem. The MPC shows "Insert MPC2000XL Disk!".
Upon loading the v1.14 OS onto a USB Stick and plugging it into a GOTEK floppy emulator it tries to load the binary file but fails and shows a crash screen with a x86 register dump.
If i load the 1.20v OS it just gets stuck and endlessly shows "Loading: MPC2KXL.BIN".
I suspect the previous owner has screwed the boot sector of the internal flash chip since the BOOT BLOCK jumper was set to BOOT UNLOCK (which allows overriding the boot sector of the internal flash chip I suppose).
Now I'm thinking of trying to boot from a recovery ROM since that might be the only way to get it working again... I'm kinda poor and can't afford one of the pre-flashed recovery ROMs that are sold online so I want to flash my own using a programmer.
I researched EPROM chips and found out that I probably need a 27C040 (512KB) or 27C080 (1MB).
I don't know if the recovery image is a special OS or just a normal OS Image as can be downloaded from the AKAI website.
First Question: When booting the recovery EPROM, does it look like the normal OS or one especially made for recovery?
Second Question: Will the normal OS fit on a 512KB EPROM. It seems to be exactly 512KiB [1KiB == 1024 byte] in size, even padded with zeros to fill all the space (actually ending around address 0x0007f5cf but with the file continuing to around the address 0x0007ffff [which is also the last address of the 27C040 Chip])?
Third Question: If the recovery OS is special, does anyone have an image of it lying around? Or does anyone have a recovery EPROM lying around and could dump the data on it (ill be glad to provide instructions).
Cheers and Thank You