Hi Glen!

I read your mail, and I must admit, that the documentation given
on the website is pretty hard to read if your not really into it.

In fact I had written the program and thought about how to build a
prommer afterwards and during the coding, and both worked from scratch :-)

I've made some photos of the hardware part after screwing it apart,
however I forgot them at home, so you will have to wait till
tomorrow. I will put everything needed and the photos on the
homepage, you can download them from there.

however, until then, there are some things you could as well do
as preperation. you have to open the monitor to get to the chip.
there is a backside plate, where you can find a round connector, this
most likely allows one to plug in a cable going to the eprom, but
not knowing the connetions or having a connector I prefered to take
out the chip, where every pin is documented on the internet, I took
it from fairchilds website as far as I remember.
to open the monitor you have to put it onto the front and unscrew the
large screws which are quite obvious to see. afterwards its no use
poking around with the round top or the backward plate (took me a year
of occasional attempts to get it), one has to press in some small
nibbles in about 4x4mm large holes on the side. one of them
was stuck at mine, and as I didnt dare to damage anything I failed to
get them pressed inside correctly for a long time. you somehow have to
get the backcover away, try sticking some screwdrivers inside and moving
them.

after you'll finally will have opened it, you have to locate the chip.
this is quite simple, one can reach it easyly with the monitor standing
in normal position again. with the front side of the monitor facing
towards you, there is a large pcb board on the left side in the back.
on this board you find an 8 pin socket, with a chip inserted, this
is the 93c66 containing the display configuration. carefully remove it 
by sticking in a screwdriver and pulling the chip out. remember how
its inserted, just in case the socket would be inserted the wrong way,
but this is unlikely, both were oriented correctly at mine.

now you have to build yourself an eprommer. this is really simple,
as most work is done by the program I wrote, you just have to get
the chips pins connected to the parallel port, as discribed in
the c source. I took an 8 pin socket and solderd its pins with
small cables to the pins of a parallel port plug. the only problem
was getting a 5v supply to one pin, you can take it with a wire from
your pcs power connectors (the red one) or, as I did just make a connector
to the joystick ports pin 1 on your soundcard.

voila. all you have to do now is put the parallel plug into
your parallel port, figure out its port adress and run the
program. the version on the site is compiled for lpt1 which is port
0x378, you can switch your port to it using your computers system
setup at bootup time.

first make a backup of whats inside the eeprom:

93c66 s backup.bin

then write a dump of a working configuration to the eeprom:

93c66 l magmxp17f.bin

this may nearly take a minute, this is because of many writing
timeouts the program waits for to be sure.

then put the chip back in its place and turn on the monitor, no
need to put the cover on already.
hopefully he will be back working again.

I will proably put this mail onto the homepage too, as its proably
quite useful for anyone with the same problem.

ru,
Franz
