Diagnostic Cart

hawk · Post by **hawk** » Tue Nov 11, 2008 11:16 pm

Does anyone have the details of this Commodore Diagnostic cart?

http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~pinwhiz/vic20.htm

Now that I have the ability to create carts with the Flexi-Cart, I'd be interested in getting a ROM dump of the Diagnostic cart and using it to test all my Vic-20s more fully.

If someone has one, can they post some pictures of the circuit, so we can determine whether it's more then just a ROM cart?

Are there designs for diagnostic jigs other than this cart?

jbuonacc · Post by **jbuonacc** » Wed Nov 12, 2008 4:11 am

very interesting, never seen this before. i wonder if it could use the same diagnostic harness as the C64/128, just plugging into the one controller port? maybe not?

ral-clan · Post by **ral-clan** » Wed Nov 12, 2008 6:57 am

I've seen it before, but that's one rare cartridges. It even has a 1001 prefix on it's product number (VIC-1001).

orion70 · Post by **orion70** » Wed Nov 12, 2008 7:20 am

Googling around, I found a cartridge similar to the one described (pictures of the inside here).
Its description file says:

The cartridge itself is labelled

DIAGNOSTIC-TEST
VIC 20/VC 20
324159-01

The cartridge is brown plastic.

The cart label and colour seem to be almost the same (up to the dash between DIAGNOSTIC and TEST), except from the serial number. In any case, its dumped ROM is available here: http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/ ... 173-01.bin

gklinger · Post by **gklinger** » Wed Nov 12, 2008 2:57 pm

I spotted something like this on eBay once and posted about it here. I wish I had the foresight to have kept the images from that auction. I won't make that mistake again.

ral-clan · Post by **ral-clan** » Wed Nov 12, 2008 3:53 pm

I'm pretty sure I grabbed them....but now to find them!

Schema · Post by **Schema** » Wed Nov 12, 2008 4:08 pm

Did this make it onto the MegaCart? Yet another possible useful feature of the MegaCart...diagnose your VIC with it!

hawk · Post by **hawk** » Wed Nov 12, 2008 5:51 pm

I hadn't seen that diagnostics info on Zimmers before. (Zimmers is blocked at work

) It seems that it has just about all the required info/images to be able to recreate the diagnostic harness, except for the connections to the IEC port.

The vc-20-diag.bin and vc-20-diag.324173-01.bin ROMs appear very similar, the latter being configured for the PAL screen. There are other differences in to binary, possibly associated with the difference clock frequency, as the program appears to display real time.

Running the ROM in VICE, it appears that it needs the 3k expansion to run correctly, hence the reason why the board is the same as the 3k RAM Expansion, and Super Expander.

orion70 · Post by **orion70** » Thu Nov 13, 2008 1:15 am

Schema wrote:Did this make it onto the MegaCart? Yet another possible useful feature of the MegaCart...diagnose your VIC with it!

Nice idea!
@nbla000: if you free some space leaving only one (or few) Denial game(s) per author on the MC, why don't you put this diagnostic cartridge on it?

ral-clan · Post by **ral-clan** » Thu Nov 13, 2008 8:49 am

ral-clan wrote:I'm pretty sure I grabbed them....but now to find them!

I had a search through my VIC image collection - I couldn't find the images of the eBay'd diagnostic cartridge. Too bad, I'm surprised I didn't grab a copy of a unique image like that.

nbla000 · Post by **nbla000** » Thu Nov 13, 2008 3:00 pm

orion70 wrote:
Schema wrote:Did this make it onto the MegaCart? Yet another possible useful feature of the MegaCart...diagnose your VIC with it!
Nice idea!
@nbla000: if you free some space leaving only one (or few) Denial game(s) per author on the MC, why don't you put this diagnostic cartridge on it?

OK guys, i will add this cart but it's really a big sacrifice for me since i've already tested everything so i need to repeat tests btw i consider this diagnostic cart too import to lack on MegaCart.

In any case addition may delay a while the MegaCart exit...

gklinger · Post by **gklinger** » Thu Nov 13, 2008 3:58 pm

What will be removed so that the diagnostic cartridge can be added?

nbla000 · Post by **nbla000** » Fri Nov 14, 2008 3:37 am

gklinger wrote:What will be removed so that the diagnostic cartridge can be added?

I need to figure which but it will be a Tape/Disk game, i need to find a solution that allows me to don't change too much...

nbla000 · Post by **nbla000** » Fri Nov 14, 2008 4:49 am

hawk wrote:The vc-20-diag.bin and vc-20-diag.324173-01.bin ROMs appear very similar, the latter being configured for the PAL screen.

Is not a problem for me to fix it for both PAL/NTSC centering.

There are other differences in to binary, possibly associated with the difference clock frequency, as the program appears to display real time.

It seems to me that is an improved version btw i think that something is wrong, why to use a real time display for a so quick test ?

Running the ROM in VICE, it appears that it needs the 3k expansion to run correctly, hence the reason why the board is the same as the 3k RAM Expansion, and Super Expander.

Looking the pictures there are 2*2114L RAM chips too, but how much RAM is it ? it seems 2*512 bytes so 1k only and in which blocks and for what ?

And last but not least.. but do you need the JOY and DATASSETTE connectors to proper execute test ? and what about IEC ?
See cassette.jpg, joy_bottom.jpg and IEC.jpg are they required ? In this case there isn't too much sense to add it to the MegaCart...

Someone may give me elucidations ?

6502dude · Post by **6502dude** » Fri Nov 14, 2008 8:41 am

There is 1K of RAM installed with ability to add an additional 2K.

The installed RAM is wired up to appear at /RAM1 location.

Likely this has been added to allow diagnostic cart to use that memory space as working ram area and to allow tests for other parts of ram in Vic-20.

It appears that none of the test devices (user port, iec, cassette, & joystick) need to attach to the cart.

So, ROM image could be included on MegaCart and people may build these test pieces as separate little projects. They should not be difficult to build.