Background As some of you may know, I’ve been working for awhile reverse engineering a DataFlyer 500 SCSI HDD controller from the 1990s. While I’ve had a working GAL replacement for the PAL for some time, I always wanted to do a side-by...
Disclaimer: While I purchased these myself at full price, Gisler did pay for shipping. This is my own opinion. If you’ve ever tried to hold multiple scope probes steady during debugging, you know how frustrating it can get. I tested three...
Intro If you’re into retro computing, you probably know the Commodore Amiga 500—a beloved classic with surprisingly capable hardware for its time. But like many vintage systems, the original power supply is often a weak point after decades of...
As some of you that have been following my reverse engineering efforts over the last few years, one of the tasks I took on was reverse engineering the BUSS PAL TIBPAL16L8-25 present in on the Expansion Systems Dataflyer plus SCSI-ONLY card. My PAL...
In September 2006, I bought a Samsung 204B SyncMaster monitor for $320 plus tax. It was a 4:3 monitor, ideal for specific tasks like my Logic Analyzer Cart. In July 2024, the monitor stopped working and wouldn’t power on. The only sign of life was a...
There was a HDD backup utility for the Commodore Amiga called Quarterback, part of a suite of tools called Quarterback Tools. This utility allowed you to backup existing files on your HDD, compress and/or encrypt them...
I just recently added another HP/Agilent logic analyzer to my collection. This time it is the 16902A. I needed to remove the CPU tray to replace the IDE HDD with a SATA SSD. As a result, I figured I’d take couple...
So for today ladies and gentlemen, I present a teardown of an HP/Agilent logic analyzer cable. I think this is part number 16715-61601. This cable is used to connect one of a series of 40-pin compatible modules (many of...
It’s often useful when trying to understand, debug, or reverse engineer a system to put together a timeline of operation from beginning to end. The result is a series of events where something happens first, then...
In order to properly reverse engineer a PAL, you need to correctly identify which pins are inputs, and which pins are outputs. This in some cases is trivial because some of the PAL’s pin functions are fixed...
Of all of the different techniques this one may be the simplest but also the most important. When you’re trying to reverse engineer something, understanding the system is key to unraveling the black box which is...
Contents Rom Dumping Dumping ROMs is a pretty common practice in the space of reverse engineering, and many eeprom readers are cheap, easily available, and there’s really not much to them. Plunk your ROM chip in...
I’ve recently put a new page online on the site. It hosts a basic outline on different techniques to enable one to reverse engineering a PAL, and produce a modern equivalent. Right now, there are about a dozen...
If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll see that I’ve been reversing a Commodore Amiga SCSI HDD Expansion card called the Dataflyer. On that Dataflyer, there’s a PAL that handles address...
Since I’ve been reverse engineering a DataFlyer Plus HDD SCSI expansion card for the Commodore Amiga, I’ve needed to get a much better understanding of how the AutoConfig process works. I’m by far no...
While trying to reverse the function of the Commodore Amiga Expansion Systems DataFlyer 500 BUSS PAL, I really needed to know what was connected to what. There are no, as far as I know(!!), schematics available for this...
So I’m in the process of trying to reverse engineer some custom PALs from a Commodore Amiga Dataflyer 500. It would be ideal to read those PALs directly, however I don’t have a compatible PAL reading...
techtravels.org is a blog that features home-grown open-source hardware and software projects.
Copyright © 2025 techtravels.org Powered by WordPress
keith