DiskOnChip board for 8-bit ISA computers / What was on my eBay DiskOnChip? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: smbaker
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 27, 2018, 06:50:46 am
content: I decided to make a DiskOnChip board for my ISA retro computer. It's a pretty simple board, the video talks a little bit about the design:Anyhow, myself and a few others were trying to guess at the purpose of the DiskOnChip. It came from eBay, so it could be out of anything. Best guess so far is that it's some sort of communications device, perhaps an access point or router. The DiskOnChip is running DOS 6.2, has a "PCTCP" TCP stack, and some program called CCUMAIN.EXE which other than being able to see parts of a Watcom runtime in it, isn't really clear what the application does. There's a HEX file as well, which my naive guess would be that it is used to program some bit of onboard hardware. Anyhow, speculation is welcome.Scott

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 30, 2018, 01:41:53 am
content: I would be very surprised if there isn't a copyright notice embedded in the software in the DoC. Dump the software and look at it with a binary editor like List.com in the ASCII mode and find the name of the company and look them up and see what their business is. If you install the DoC in a computer and boot from it, it will probably run long enough to display a menu or copywrite notice or other information on the video monitor. Standard SVGA is backwards compatible with all of the previous standard PC video systems so use an SVGA monitor.Even if the software was written in something like MicroSoft C and compiled there is usually still a message in the compiled software that says who's compiler it was and what version. It should say "MicroSoft C version 6.0" or something of that nature.In the Windows 3.1 days we were performing software audits and doing exactly what I have described and we used a DOS version of List.com and set to display only ASCII text and we searched for the string "Ver" and would find what we were looking for on the first try about 98% of the time. List.com in the ASCII mode will hide all non-text information and any text will JUMP out at you.

author: smbaker
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 30, 2018, 01:57:25 am
content: I did load the interesting looking application in a hex editor and page through it, but didn't find a copyright notice. I admit I didn't look real hard.The primary application comes with an INI file that looks like a mix of things I can understand and things I can't:Code:{ // ×éÌ¬ÎÄ¼þ¿ªÊ¼{ // ¹¤³Ì±êÊ¶¹¤³ÌÃû = áéÖÝ¾Þ»¯Ô°Çø±äÄê = 2002ÔÂ = 12ÈÕ = 13Ê± = 12·Ö = 46Ãë = 52ºÁÃë = 470} // ¹¤³Ì±êÊ¶½áÊøThere's digits, newlines, what might be //-style comments, but my naive guess is this is using a font that I don't have, for a language I don't read.It does boot, but as soon as the main application loads, it gets upset that I'm running on a lowly 8-bit machine that doesn't have protected mode.

author: bsfeechannel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 30, 2018, 01:29:07 pm
content: It seems that what you have is the encoding for simplified Chinese possibly of Taiwanese origin. Attached you'll find a screen capture of the possible solution to the enigma. For some reason the forum doesn't let me post Chinese characters directly on the page.EDIT: Correction, the character set is probably GB2312 used in mainland China, using EUC-CN encoding. It is compatible with ASCII for ASCII characters, and extended (two bytes) for Chinese characters.