[LMH]General Note (Legal Question, Status Update, More Questions)

[Daniel Seagraves]

First, does TI still sell the Explorer/Explorer II?

Just curious...  This thing is getting dangerously close to flying, and
I'm curious how likely TI is to sue me if I produce a working emulator.
(Since it will be using their ROM code/microcode/OS/software/documentation
/etc)

I didn't think of this until just now. ^_^

Besides, under DMCA, I think reverse-engineering anything for any reason
became a crime - I forget. (Land of the free, HAH!)

[Sidenote - Hi, A5!  Get anything incriminating on me yet?]

Note that the answer does not mean I'm going to stop hacking, it means
that at worst I have to restrict distribution of my code to people with
physical gear. I'm having far too much fun with this to stop, short of
papers from TI's lawyers or a request from Explorer HW developers or
something.

For the record, I've switched gears somewhat - I'm doing the Explorer I
first (because I have diagnostics and such for it), but making the boards
"pluggable" so all you have to do is recompile and rebuild later to get an
Explorer II.  I've got the display and keyboard working via SDL, and I'm
taking the disk format apart and getting ready for the microload right
now.  I am *NOT* running TI's boot ROM yet, because I don't have a copy
of it. I have the SIB and LAN ROMs, but I don't use them either because I
don't have any documentation for Diagnostic Engine code. (Preliminary
examination says making a cross-platform NIC driver is gonna be difficult
BTW...)

Oh, one other thing, can the Explorer tell the difference between left
meta/right meta, or left super/right super?  I'm trying to figure out how
to map a PC keyboard to something remotely resembling the TI keyboard.

Does anyone have a working Explorer II?  The physical machine, I mean.
I might have to ask someone to dump disks and ROMs for the E2 for me.

Also, could you upgrade an Explorer I to an Explorer II just by swapping
CPU cards and disks?  Or was there anything else?

The last question is about the CPU cold-start - Did the Explorer (either
one) have a front-end CPU to load microcode and start the CPU, or was the
Explorer CPU the only one?  If the Explorer CPU is the only CPU, how does
it reload I-Memory without confusing itself?