From: Brian Parker (bunnyboy_at_sealiecomputing.com)
Date: Mon Feb 23 2004 - 21:52:51 PST
On Monday, February 23, 2004, at 09:23 PM, Jim Witte wrote:
>> Step One: Gather parts from old Newton
>
> This does raise an interesting question: would it be possible
> without
> *too* much difficulty (save finding the necessary equipment) to do
> multiple x-ray scans of the MP2000 PCB (it's probably 4-6 layers),
> clean up the image, then run it through a program that would reproduce
> a schematic (after tediously entering in values for the.. oh 60-100-odd
> components on the board? Can such precision focus x-ray even be done
> (or more to the point, *has* it been applied to reverse-engineering - I
> read that such beasts exist), and does such
> schematic-generating/rearrangement software exist?
>
> Or have I not had enough sleep lately?
>
None of us has had enough sleep Jim =] While this could be done and I
believe the machines exist to do it, there are still bigger problems.
The biggest unknowns are the architecture of that huge Voyager chip.
The board wiring could be figured out with a multimeter and tons of
time, while the innards of the chip are a big mystery. There are even
more expensive machines that will deconstruct chips, pretty much
stripping off layers and using an electron microscope to map stuff.
All of this I'm sure is quite expensive. I think the actual hardware
will always be mostly an unknown. It is better to figure out the lower
layers of software and use those to write an emulator.
Brian Parker
www.sealiecomputing.com - NewtChat, MathFaster, NewtGlider, and USB NES
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