[NTLK] Diagnostic Cards, Romulators & K Prime

[Grant Hutchinson]

Ok, buckle up y’all.

On a quest to suss out a few more terms for the Newton Glossary, I’m been traveling way back into the list archives with the hope of reviving a couple of threads about Steve White’s “K Diagnostics Card” [1] and Victor Rehorst’s subsequent investigation [2] of the information stored in the binary dump of the card that had been uploaded to UNNA [3] by Steve.

[1] http://newtontalk.net/archive/newtontalk/2013-December/049788.html
[2] http://newtontalk.net/archive/newtontalk/2018-May/054720.html
[3] http://www.unna.org/incoming/k-diags-1.4.3.bin.gz

From Victor’s 2018 post:

> It appears to be a copy of all of the entire raw flash *data* portion of the card, that is, not including the CIS information. It's not a ROM image.  It's definitely *something*.  Running "strings" on the binary blob gives a lot of interesting output though.  My favourites are:
> 
> C Library vsn 4.01 [Sep  5 1996]
> Q Romulator Detected
> Q Romulator: Hammer Initialized
> Booting a Q
> Booting a K
> Booting a K Prime
> 
> ... wait, what?  I know a "Q" is a MessagePad 2000, and a "K" is an eMate, but what the heck is a "K Prime"?

The terms “Q”, “K”, “K Diags”, and “Hammer” are already in the glossary.

However, I would like to properly define “Romulator” and “K Prime”.

My basic understanding is that a Romulator is a software-based “ROM emulator” used in testing and debugging of hardware. It utilizes its own RAM to bypass or replace the physical ROM on the device it is connected to.

Does this sound correct? I haven’t been able to locate a decent definition online.

As a side note, Steve pointed out in another thread [4] that an image of one of my Bunwarmer prototypes [5] includes what he said was a Romulator board.

[4] http://newtontalk.net/archive/newtontalk/2017-March/053386.html
[5] https://www.flickr.com/photos/splorp/33171767566/

If you zoom into the upper left corner of the Bunwarmer, the Romulator board is labeled “Abuser”.

That seems like another code name from the Newton development team, right?

As for “K Prime” ... back in 2018 [6] I thought it might be a reference to the bMate / Business eMate / eMate 1000 [7] speculated to have been in development at Apple.

[6] http://newtontalk.net/archive/newtontalk/2018-May/054722.html
[7] https://newtonglossary.com/terms/bmate

I haven’t seen this name mentioned anywhere else, but maybe some old Newton team folks might have an idea.

If anyone has anything to add to this, fell free to pipe in.

g.

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Grant Hutchinson
NewtonTalk List Dad & Web Custodian