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Tinkering and Fiddling

Adventures in disassembling, reverse-engineering and hacking.

November 16, 2017 Blog Archive

► 2019 (2)
Hacking on a Digital Lightwave ASA-PKG-OC12 (part ► 2018 (6)

2) ▼ 2017 (3)
▼ November (3)
Main Board Hacking on a Digital
Lightwave ASA-
Some photos of the main board. I marked up important stuff with a silver sharpie (pretty sure it's non-conductive...) Most PKG-OC12 (part 3)
of the interesting stuff hails from PC104 board's 96-pin connector, so I marked the corner pins (1A and 32C) and put a Hacking on a Digital
mark for every fifth row. This made beeping out connections much easier. Lightwave ASA-
PKG-OC12 (part 2)

The keyboard connector is on the opposite side in the lower-right part of the board, near the video adapter cable thing, Hacking on a Digital
marked "KBD". The touchscreen controller's serial port is the small white connector at the bottom edge, marked "COM2". Lightwave ASA-
PKG-OC12

► 2013 (2)

Links
Falstad.com Circuit
Simulator
My GitHub Profile
My Twitter Profile

Note all the Xilinx ICs. There's a National Instruments GPIB controller near the top, under the COM1 serial connector.
Next to it are the driver and receiver ICs for the GPIB connector in the upper right.
The main board's topside shows the square brown PC104 board and all of the rear panel connectors. That high-density
IDC connector on the left site goes to a PCMCIA daughterboard through a cable. The right half of the board seems to be
telecom stuff exclusively, and there are several 82C55s, presumably to interface to the PC104's ISA bus.

Attaching a Keyboard

Fortunately, Goodwill had a cheap PS/2 keyboard. After lopping off the PS/2 connector and figuring out the weird wire
colors, I terminated the cable with a cheap 0.1" connector. I desoldered the keyboard connector and wired in a mating
connector, and I had a working keyboard:

I'm in?

With the keyboard attached, I finally had some means of affecting the boot-up process. The Pause key works, and gave
me a glimpse of the POST screen:
The good old CTRL-ALT-DELETE three-finger salute allowed me to restart whenever I wanted to. Despite trying every
BIOS key I could remember, I could not get into any sort of BIOS setup screen. Fortunately, CTRL-C also worked, so I
was able to halt the boot process and get a DOS prompt:

Yay, MS-DOS 6.22!

I Don't Remember DOS Very Well

The boot-up process seems to go something like this:

1. The Autoexec.bat file creates a RAMDISK at D:

2. Three .ZIP files on the C: drive (BOOT.zip, IMAGE.zip and ND.zip) are uncompressed into D: and various
commands are executed there to set up the MS mouse driver for the touch screen, etc.
 3. One of the unzipped programs is called MEGA.EXE. This seems to be the main Digital Lightwave GUI program,
which unfortunately still seems to go nowhere, even after 10 minutes of waiting.

I can't figure out a good way of editing the autoexec.bat file. All I remember is the TYPE command, which doesn't have a
way to display only a page at a time, so I have to be quick with the PAUSE keyboard button. The MORE program isn't
present, so I can't pipe the output to that. How the heck do I edit BAT files in a crippled DOS?

Exfiltrating Files

The next question is: how can I pull files off this thing (or put new ones on)? If I could do that, I could edit the
autoexec.bat (in a roundabout way, anyway).

INTERSVR.EXE is present, but as far as I can tell, there's no way to connect with modern Windows, and the process
takes a while.

The network port is probably working, but I've never done anything with DOS and networking, so I'm totally in the dark
there. I've read that PC-DOS has some networking capabilities built in, so if I can boot to a floppy I might be able to get
something working there. But I'd need an FTP client (and set up an FTP server) to exfil anything. Ugh.

I don't have any kind of Flash storage card for the PCMCIA socket. Building a cable to connect the 26-pin SCSI port to
one of my dusty old SCSI drives might work, but I'm lazy and this would have some knock-on complications as I'd have to
get SCSI working on a Windows computer to read the drive. Additionally, I really don't like SCSI.

That leaves me with Floppy exfiltration. I think the contents of the C drive will fit on a single floppy, so this is probably the
way to go. All I'll have to do is make a custom power cable to plug the floppy drive into the PSU. I'll still have to put a
floppy drive on a Windows machine, but that will take less time than the other options.

Posted by Jim Wagner

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