Sadly, no the WP-2 can't write to the flash. The flash will just behave as a rom.
And I have no idea as yet what might go ON such a rom card. Just "whatever once came on rom cards originally", of which I don't even know of any yet. Maybe they never actually made any? It will be writable with a TL866 or similar programmer and a simple adapter which is just a pcb with two sets of pins on it. The flash chip is writable with nothing but the same 5v power as for reading, so it could in theory be writable by the WP-2 itself, but the WP-2 firmware doesn't know how to do the write operation. We could go way off the farm here, because in theory all kinds of things are tantalizingly possible and not too far out of reach. But I, right now, am only after some much lower-hanging fruit! ;) To have the WP-2 write to flash directly would take, possibly in theory it might be possible to hack the firmware to give it a flash write routine, except there is no practical way to update the rom on a WP-2. It can be done, but it's not a simple thing anyone can do. Or adding a microcontroller to the card to act as a translator, so the WP-2 thinks it's connected to an SRAM, while really a microcontroller is reading & writing an sd card. That might not even be too crazy of a project because it could replace the WP-2 version of MounT while being physically smaller, and more convenient because it wouldn't need a battery. But I think instead of a writable flash, the next thing I will try once the current simple ram and rom cards are set, is adding a coin cell to the RAM card. That might take the shape of a larger pcb that fills the slot instead of this tiny pcb. No 3d-printed carrier, but maybe a 2nd pcb soldered to the top to fill the slot to keep the card from flopping around and keep the pin header aligned with the pins. The overall card would still be flat, and no thicker, so it would still slip right into the pocket in the WP-2 sleeve the same as an original card. Might even use a larger SRAM and have a switch to select between several 128K banks. That would preserve the data long enough to treat it like a flash drive, and be a somewhat simpler project I think. To move data between that card and a modern machine, you'd use the WP-2's built-in TPDD client and a serial cable. -- bkw On Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 10:14 AM Josh Malone <josh.mal...@gmail.com> wrote: > That sounds awesome, Brian! I'm excited to build one of these once the > PCB is ready. Is the flash version able to be written by the WP-2? Or > is this just for running z80 programs on the WP-2 which you flash > externally? > > -Josh > > On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 12:45 AM Brian White <b.kenyo...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > The last piece I as waiting for came in today and the ram card works > both mechanically and functionally. >
