Probably a stupid question???

[Justin]

What size is a stock bin file. I was trying to do some comparing of the bins on some proms I had and two of them are 4kb in size and one of them I downloaded that was supposedly (stock 87 GN) was 16kb in size. But the whole beginning of the bin was 00's. What am I looking at here, and how do I compose them if I want to campare? They all open fine in tunercat.

 

[TurboGeezer]

TR BIN Files

From what I have found, just about every TR BIN that you will ever find will be 4kb in size. Yes, there are a few exceptions that you may find........specialty items like a Thrasher BIN that someone sent me (that I have never even bothered to look at). However, most, if not all of your "standard" BIN files will be 4kb.

TG

 

[Justin]

Thanks. I thought maybe someone was putting it on a larger size prom and needed to fill up space. Looks like they used 00 through the first half of the bin then doubled up the stock bin for the other half. Who knows. Won't open in Tunercat though.

 

[ijames]

The 7148 uses a 2732 or 2732 eprom which holds 4k bytes. There is another 8k bytes of code in a rom inside the cpu chip. Of the 4k in the eprom, the first 2k bytes are data tables and the last 2k is more code. The eprom goes in the 64k byte memory space of the cpu as $3000 to $3FFF (that's hex). So, all bin files should be 4k bytes for a single chip image. There are a few versions of thumbwheel chips around which have adapted a 27256 eprom (or flash) which holds 32k bytes or eight chip images, selecting one image to run using a thumbwheel switch, so it's possible if you have a bin file for one of those it's bigger than 4k. I think there's even a 27512 version, holding 64k bytes or 16 images. However, it's rare to run across bin files for the thumbwheels.