Day 26: Moment of Fail
With the clock running down, it was time for the moment of truth: could I actually boot of one of my hacked-together custom ROMs? For that matter, would it even fit it in the cabinet? My first attempt, using 6" jumpers to bridge the ill-sized .9" DIP board to a set of pin headers, failed utterly. The pins just weren't going to sit in the socket, and there wasn't room in the cage for that mess of cables. Luckily, an eagle-eyed resistor found a ribbon cable with a DIP IDC header on it (similar to this). Using the correct parts was out of the question, so I found and old IDE cable, took off two of the IDC connectors, and clamped them to the ribbon. I popped some pin headers in and checked the continuity-- success! This might actually work after all!
I grabbed an old Teensy 2.0++ and hacked together some code for writing and testing the EEPROM carrier board I'd thrown together on day 24. One mess of jumpers and a stack of bits adapted from Trammell's ROM dumper code later, I had a working ROM. Multiple successes! I am unstoppable.
[cue Mozart's "Failure Dirge" on rdio right about now]
Finally, I rushed home, pried the ROMS from one of the basic video terminal boards, dropped in the custom ROM, put the AVO daughterboard back on top, slapped in the card and hit power, and got... nothing.
Thinking that perhaps I'd misconfigured the AVO, I popped it off, restarted, and was greeted with the bottom image below. Great. I figured I'd double-check my data and pop the ROM into my old ROM dumper, but surprise: it had disappeared sometime in the past week. No problem; I'd just gotten a shipment of 40-pin ZIF sockets so I could grab another Teensy and build a new one. That seemed sensible, until I got to NYCR and discovered that we were completely out of Teensy 2.0++s.
At this point, understanding the situation I was in, I retreated to the basement of my home, sat in a lotus position in front of the boiler, and intoned to myself softly:
This is all but step in the Hero's Journey.
Then I grabbed my logic analyser and got to work.
