Do you know someone who might have Eureka A4 note taker in a working conditions these days? I'm interested in other than czech language variants. Or alternativelly do you know where to look for ROM dump from such a device?
I’ve got one, but the battery’s faulty, so it only works if I plug it into the mains. That’s why I reckon the floppy disk drive isn’t working. As for the second question, I’ve no idea.
@Juan CBS Oh, working diskette drive is yet another requirement for being able to dump the rom easily. When the AC power is applied can you get the drive working? I assume the drive might work when the battery is disconnected.
I think the floppy disk drive only works if the battery is in. It doesn’t work on mine, and the one at the National Organisation of the Blind in Spain, when I used to work there, had exactly the same problem.
A few years ago, I was thinking of taking it to an electronics technician to see if they could make me a new battery, but in the end I couldn’t be bothered, and it’s still there, tucked away in a cupboard along with other old kit, such as some Spanish-language voice synthesisers and similar bits and bobs from the 90s.
@Juan CBS It needs more powerfull AC adapter in order to get the floppy drive to work. One of my friends is using 2A 9V adapter that came with his huawei wifi router instead of the original Eureka one. If the battery is broken in a way so the machine turns off completelly when the AC power is unplugged it's safest to disconnect it by using the hidden switch in left hand side corner.
I am not sure about the Eureka memory layout for making the rom dump so I would have to lookup the technical manual online for attempting doing that.
Also we would need some app such as dosread in order to copy the data from the eureka disk format to the IBM PC compatible disk format.
So it's all quite involved.
Still I would appreciate going through all of this as my friends already have a prototype of windows based Eureka A4 emulator working.
Maybe… This notetaker wasn’t a success in Spain. In fact, I only got hold of mine because someone was about to throw it away, but I never actually used it myself, nor did I ever teach anyone how to use it, as it had already fallen out of use by the time I started working. The Spanish voice output was so poor that hardly anyone wanted to use it. The Braille’n Speak, on the other hand, was widely used.
@Juan CBS The attitude has been quite the opposite over here in slovakia and czech republic. Everyone enjoyed using Eureka, there were loads of tiny applications coded in both basic and turbo pascal. Built-in music editor was used extensively for creating poliphonic music. When braille'n'speak came as the potential successor, despite being more powerfull it was not as feature rich when compared to Eureka A4. I did my first attempt at simple programming using Eureka back in the days.
Even this conversation is interesting to me, so huge thanks for your replies so far.
Juan CBS
in reply to Peter Vágner • • •Peter Vágner
in reply to Juan CBS • •Juan CBS
in reply to Peter Vágner • • •Juan CBS
in reply to Juan CBS • • •Peter Vágner
in reply to Juan CBS • •@Juan CBS It needs more powerfull AC adapter in order to get the floppy drive to work. One of my friends is using 2A 9V adapter that came with his huawei wifi router instead of the original Eureka one. If the battery is broken in a way so the machine turns off completelly when the AC power is unplugged it's safest to disconnect it by using the hidden switch in left hand side corner.
I am not sure about the Eureka memory layout for making the rom dump so I would have to lookup the technical manual online for attempting doing that.
Also we would need some app such as dosread in order to copy the data from the eureka disk format to the IBM PC compatible disk format.
So it's all quite involved.
Still I would appreciate going through all of this as my friends already have a prototype of windows based Eureka A4 emulator working.
Juan CBS
in reply to Peter Vágner • • •Peter Vágner
in reply to Juan CBS • •@Juan CBS The attitude has been quite the opposite over here in slovakia and czech republic. Everyone enjoyed using Eureka, there were loads of tiny applications coded in both basic and turbo pascal. Built-in music editor was used extensively for creating poliphonic music.
When braille'n'speak came as the potential successor, despite being more powerfull it was not as feature rich when compared to Eureka A4.
I did my first attempt at simple programming using Eureka back in the days.
Even this conversation is interesting to me, so huge thanks for your replies so far.
Juan CBS
in reply to Peter Vágner • • •