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azraphale
November 4th, 2006, 06:50 AM
I am working on a project that involves 8048-series MPUs, used circa mid-80s, as well as other complementary Intel chips; however, the specifics of the chips are unknown, as they are packed in a proprietary format.

I am looking for someone who is good with that vintage of digital Intel products to help me figure out a particular piece of old tech hardware (it is a self-contained microcontroller with onboard EPROM and RAM as well as A/D converters and assorted analog input processing) and get ROM dumps from it (I think some of them are masked or something, as my dumps are missing some data I know are in there).

Anyone with experience in these processors, and/or decompiling and working with me to understand the self-bootstrapping runtime, should please contact me ASAP via email. espresso_doppio@yahoo.com

This project is not a for-profit venture, but anyone offering significant assistance will get a share of anything the project nets (it's more of a hobbyist thing, but I do intend to recover my development and manufacturing costs once the project is completed). I figured this might be a good place to find people who were hardware geeks from around that period and who might have insight on the workings of my hardware. Thanks! (x-posted to the programming forum)

ziloo
November 4th, 2006, 11:20 AM
As far as I remember, 8048 series of Intel microcontrollers were not
equipped with A/D converters or Analog input capability. The next series
of microcontrollers from Intel, namely 8051, came out in different models
and amongst them, there were models with both A/D feature and ROM and
EPROM Lock system. According to Intel manual, depending on the model,
the chip can have one or three-level program lock system and a 64-byte
encryption table to protect the on-board program against software piracy.

For additional information, you can refer to "Intel, Embedded Microcontrollers, 1994" manual.

azraphale
November 5th, 2006, 01:50 AM
I apparently was unclear. Thre appears to be outboard a/d conversion. The application is a standalone controller unit, and the unit itself has everything you would expect to find in a modern microcontroller; much of it appears to be on other chips inside the unit, rather than onboard the processor itself.

I doubt that a manual will be of much help in determining the pinout and memory access functions of a chip when I am only marginally familiar with logic-level hardware of that vintage, and I don't imagine it will be easy for me to source a 12 year old manual. I'll keep an eye out for both tools and resources, and individuals who might be helpful in determining the specifics of what is on the controller units I have.

Blotto
November 20th, 2006, 04:54 AM
Hi,

Try this link...i think it will help.

http://home.mnet-online.de/al/mcs-48/mcs-48.pdf

azraphale
November 20th, 2006, 09:05 AM
Thanks a ton, that's great!

I'll have to scour the search engines, as I would also like to find one for the Motorola 6801 series.