German Minerva-ROM

By | 2017-03-05

Since changing from MGG to the Minerva ROM a few decades ago I’ve never used an unmodified Minerva ROM, I always used one where the German keyboard tables were patched into the binary somehow (by Jochen Hassler I think). This changed when I installed the QL-SD interface in my QL as it comes with a vanilla ROM where the German keyboard support had to be loaded every time, which I found fairly annoying. But now that the Minerva sources are publicly available changing this is fairly easy: take the Minerva source code plus the source of the German language pack, stir a bit and voila, a new ROM. The only thing missing is the printer translation table as that pushes the ROM beyond the 48KB limit.
As probably not everybody can do such a thing I provide the resulting binaries here, in case somebody finds it useful:

Minerva

As for an EEPROM programmer I ordered one at my currently favourite Chinese store Ali-Express (being so cheap that I spent a truck-load of money there this year…). In this case I got myself the somewhat more expensive TL866A for just 60€, which also includes a lot of adapters:

TL866A universal chip programmer

But the smaller brother TL866 can be had for less than 35€ including shipping. This is an amazing piece of hardware for the price (usually it’s also available on eBay for slightly more) that finally lets me retire Jochen Hassler’s excellent but nowadays slightly outdated QL Eprommer II board:

Jochen Hassler’s Eprommer II board

One thought on “German Minerva-ROM

  1. Pingback: German Version of Minerva ROM | QUANTA

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