[NTLK] Newton ROM card circuit board files reverse engineered

[Matthias Melcher]

> On Feb 20, 2017, at 4:33 AM, Jeff Sheldon <jeffsheldon at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Matthias,
> 
> This is exemplary work.  I was taking a very similar approach with the 2100 mainboard (stripped, sliced, duplicated traces), but stopped abruptly some years ago. I was actually considering starting up again with the ROM board this week, so I'm glad you announced this.  Custom ROM deployment has some pretty major implications. 
> 
> Congrats on the successful reversing, PCB design and unexpected solid write-up.  Documentation is a lost art. 

Thanks, Jeff. It was one and a half days of very focused long hours. I think that doing the main board would be at least a week, and I wonder at what error rate.

I had a first go at the ROM board a few years back, but I just could not figure out how to solve the Eagle issues. I even started to write a tool that would allow back annotation, but it got complex quickly. I ended up spending more days on the software than I did on the actual reverse engineering.

Since non of that is commercially viable, or in any other way gainful, documenting seems to be the most important part of all of this Newton "nonsense". Otherwise it would be like collecting stamps, but never putting them in an album ;-)

Would you be interested in designing a new board?

 - Matthias