Altos 886 ROM Update Question...

[aplmak]

So I have an Altos 886 and it has ROM version 1.1 but I have a copy of v2.2 from another machine.. These motherboards usually always have all these after manufacturing tweaks added to them. New trace wires.. extra resistors... redirecting of traces, etc. You think updating the ROM from 1.1 to 2.2 will affect anything? I just thought since I have the newer and I burned a couple of chips why not update them? All the other ROMS on the board and controller when I did a compare are exactly the same. Just the HI and LO main roms have some differences. I'm not an expert with ROMS... just thought I'd throw that out there for some advice from the group. Any advice is welcome Happy New Year!

 

[Svenska]

Randomly replacing ROM contents is unlikely to work in general. If the newer ROMs were sold with updated mainboard revisions or require modifications to the hardware, they probably assume that these modifications have been done.

ROM chips are usually called "HI" and "LO" when the system combines two 8-bit wide chips in a 16-bit machine (e.g. 80286 based). They must be paired correctly, as each chip contains half of every data word.