[NTLK] Newton ROM info (for Einstein)

[Mason Mark]

Hi, this is Mason (developer of Dash Board) and I would love to join in all this wild and crazy new EiPad fun.

Unfortunately I'm presently stuck in China, and my Newton is back in Tokyo. So, sorry to blast the list with a personal request, but I'm hoping for some help. And no, it is not to email me the ROM (not that I'd sic Apple's black helicopters on anybody who did that, but I think there's a more legitimate way).

I actually have several Newton ROM images on a box back at the office (including some with informative names like 'newton_rom'), but alas, none of them work with Einstein. (I know this because I previously poked and prodded at Einstein a bit after meeting Paul and hearing about it, but it wasn't working, and then getting a serial cable and redumping my ROM image became one of those things that I just never got around to.)

Anyway, all of my ROM images appear to have some junk header or legacy file format info in them--they are all too big. (A few of them were provided with Apple's developer tools, I believe.) But a ROM's a ROM, so I think the data must be in there if I can find right offsets and eliminate the junk.

So if some kind soul has Einstein working on the pad and could find the time to email me the hex of the first 128 bytes and the last 128 bytes of their working ROM image file, then I think I should be able to ssh into my box at the office, find the right rom image, and--if my Chinese net connection stays up--have it by morning. (Yeah, it's really slow here. It might have something to do with the deep-packet-inspection network wiretapping by government authorities at every major peering point.)

A fairly painless way to do that would be to get the program Hex Fiend:

  http://ridiculousfish.com/hexfiend

Then, open your ROM image file, and select the first few lines from the first column, and copy/paste. Then scroll to the end of the file, select the very last few lines, and copy/paste. The output would just be some hexadecimal gibberish, looking something like this (but a bit longer):

E1 A0 00 00 E1 A0 00 00 EB 00 00 0C 00 00 00 00 EF 00 00 11 00 71 A9 5C 00 00 52 F0 00 1C AD F0

If anybody is up to it, well, thanks a lot! I'll be back in a couple of weeks, but I just want to get started playing with this exciting stuff *now*! 

Mad props to Paul and Matthias.

Best regards,
--
Mason Mark
mason at fivespeed.com
former Newton developer @ Five Speed Software