2068 Command Cartridge EPROMs

[mbliss11]

Hey everyone! I picked up a command cartridge online for a few bucks that came with a Zebra OS chip. I was hoping to use this with some other 27256’s I have and try out a few of the limited games that came out on cart for this system.

I downloaded a few game roms (some 9k other were more) and attempted to flash them using my t48. Threw a few on the card and booted up but nada. 9k games aren’t even recognized and a 33k game was just garbled screen. I am definitely doing something wrong I am not that experienced with burning roms so far I have only used it to read and check IC’s.

Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated

 

[SiriusHardware]

Hi Mbliss11 - what format are the hex files which you tried to program these EPROMs with? Are they plain binary (which usually has a '.bin' extension) or some other file format, like ASCII HEX (Usually has a '.hex' extension), or Intel Hex (confusingly sometimes also '.hex' or occasionally '.int') or Motorola .S9 (usually has .S9F extension).

 

[mbliss11]

Hey Sirius! So I actually had a nice chat exchange with David who runs timexsinclair.com and I was using the cart image files he had on his site. Those were modified roms that were used for the Timex emulator that needed to have 9bytes shaved off of the header for them to work on real hardware. They had a dck extension but could be read with a hex editor.

So the plot thickens a bit because interestingly enough there are 3 different types of cartridges that the 2068 used. David gave me this nice page from a community member over there that explained it:

https://timex.comboios.info/tscart.html

And David also explained that most games generally were not mapped to the 0-16 block that the card that i got used for the Z-OS rom. He suggested I grab this:

https://www.andertone.com/product/timex-sinclair-2068-cartridge-printed-circuit-board/

This would allow you to change the mapping locations of the rom.

Learn something new every day

 

[SiriusHardware]

Let us know how it works out for you - interesting topic.

 

[mbliss11]

Have had success in using .dck files and removing the first 9bytes for some games. These all appear to be AROS type roms and worked with my current card.