Fwd: MZ-N505 (and others) Service Mode

Apologies if this appears twice, but I sent it Monday evening when the
list stalled and it never arrived back, so I'm assuming it got 
dropped...

Pete.


Begin forwarded message:

> From: Pete Bentley <[email protected]>
> Date: Wed Jan 22, 2003  00:26:40 Europe/London
> To: netmd-dev <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: MZ-N505 (and others) Service Mode
>
> On Tuesday, Jan 21, 2003, at 13:24 Europe/London, Sebastian Hartmann 
> wrote:
>> HOW will one sony service or developer guy ever try to figure out if 
>> the data on the MD is exactly the same like the data on a PC, from 
>> which it has been uploaded to the MD? My thought is: there must be 
>> some way to exactly verify the _data_ on the MD, as simply verifying 
>> some checksum must not mean that the data is identical.
>
> This has mostly been covered by other people on the list, but as a 
> final
> thought, *why* would they need to do that? The USB protocols already 
> take
> care of error detection and correction on the bus, and you would expect
> the firmware in the player to do some checking that the data was 
> written
> to disk correctly (the same checking it would do if recording from an
> analogue source). So no need to copy the data all the way back to the
> PC.
>
>> I like very much to know what all the service options in the service 
>> mode stand for. Is there really NO one who is able to obtain some 
>> service manual or service sheet?
>
> The service manuals don't really explain what all the options control
> (at least, not all the numbers in the EEPROMs)... There is a Polish guy
> who has figured a lot of that stuff out, but I don't think he has
> written it all up yet.
>
>> Wouldn´t it be possible, although there is no real official feature 
>> of transferring the data from the MD to the PC via USB, that it (the 
>> desired transfer), through a command, or a dialogue between the 
>> MDPlayer and some service software can be triggered?
>
> Possible, but wishful thinking I suspect :)
>
>> Is it REALLY impossible to obtain some diagnostics software for the 
>> NetMD? I mean these service people are also real existing humans.
>> I am sure all these things exist. And i wonder why it is impossible 
>> to get hands on either such software or documentation.
>
> There is some software for reading and writing EEPROM values (but 
> probably
> not firmware or anything else) called PatchWriter... Seems impossible
> to get hold of a copy (see my posts in the archives on that subject).
>
> Pete.
>