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

[Paul Fuqua]

    Date: Sun, 19 May 2002 21:43:55 -0500 (CDT)
    From: Daniel Seagraves <dseagrav@sakura.lunar-tokyo.net>
    
    First, does TI still sell the Explorer/Explorer II?

No.  Nobody does, except as a used item.  I've been poking around trying
to find out about TI's licensing stance, but I haven't learned anything
useful yet.
    
    Besides, under DMCA, I think reverse-engineering anything for any reason
    became a crime - I forget. (Land of the free, HAH!)

There is no "anti-circumvention" mechanism in place -- no passwords, no
file protections, no encryption -- so I doubt DMCA would apply.
Besides, it's not retroactive, is it?
    
    Oh, one other thing, can the Explorer tell the difference between left
    meta/right meta, or left super/right super?

It can at the level of keycodes, but when forming characters the
left/right distinction is ignored.
    
    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.

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

CPU card only.  The only other difference was microcode;  an E1 ran the
same load band as an E2.  Indeed, my E2 started life as an E1 and just
acquired the new CPU and some memory and disks along the way.
    
    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?

No, no FEP.  It probably ran the loading code in high memory and
arranged for a reset to happen when that was overwritten.  I'll see if I
can find a hint of that in some ancient listings, if I can find that
box.

                              pf