From EPROM burner to ROM emulator
From first boot until the M15 release, every build that ran on the PB686 went in on a pair of EPROMs I burned in Xgpro, one chip for the even bytes and one for the odd. All that swapping had worn out the sockets enough to cause boot failures, so I'd already had to replace them once.
On 23 October two One ROM units went in instead. For their first boot I loaded them with the same M15 release I'd been running from EPROMs, so the One ROMs were the only new thing on the bench. POST came up complete, and since the CF card was still in my PC it ended at "No bootable disk", which is exactly right.
The second boot, with the card back in, got as far as "Starting MS-DOS..." and then stopped with a write fault on COM1. That one was my fault, not the ROM's: my AUTOEXEC.BAT sends the console to the serial port, and nothing on the PC side was listening yet. Once it was, the PB686 read back its own ROM and it matched the M15 release exactly.
Same boot, a blank 360K disk written on the Greaseweazle went into the 1.2 MB drive, and Atlas read it back perfectly. Since then Claude does the One ROM programming with the PB686 switched off, and a new image only counts once both units read back exactly right.
