The Intermec 6651 does have a BIOS!

I was giving the 6651 a reset today while a lot of key's were pressed down (the keyboard was disabeled). The 6651 waited a second and it went off. (normaly it will go of immediately) Normaly it should turn on direct and you will see the desktop. Not this time, I saw this message



The onliest I could do was reset the 6651 again, so I did and the 6651 was normal again.
when I did the 'trick' a second time I got this:



instead of rebooting the 6651 I pressed again a lot of keys and then I rebooted the 6651. The result was this:




This looks like a BIOS, the same kind you will find on a normal computer!

Anyone expirience with the 6651's bios? Can we tweak/update it??


I have the 6651 with CE3.0 OS. I pressed my whole hand on the keyboard, so at least ten keys must be pressed down while I was resetting the 6651

Now that is cool. Heck, I'd be worried that I couldn't figure out how to duplicate it...so I might never turn it off again.

Rich

I can acces the 'bios' again by pressing all the keys and than reset. For this I place a antique organiser (6" x 3" or 15 x 8 cm) onto the keyboard to press almoast all the keys. I've tried it four times and all the four times the 6651 was direct going to the bios after a reset

The 6651 does have a 8 MB flash which is not in use! In the bios there is a option to check the 8MB flash. With this check the flash will be erassed and checked. The 6651 is fuly working after this, so on this flash memory there are no files of the OS..

oh wow...

i'll need to get a complete memory dump of my 6651's and see what's in the flash

but i doubt you can update this bios thing.. it's probably the bootstrap in masked rom

Edited by cmonex 2008-03-31 1:14 PM

It would be good, nonetheless, if we could sort out exactly which key combo triggers the above screens. Maybe some experimenting will uncover some new things we can do with this device. (Since I'm working on a review of the 6651 as we speak, I'd certainly be interested in what we can learn from this little experiment.)

I wonder if there is something in there that could resolve the USB port on the 890 hack....

I have another 6651, a 'crappy' model (dead battery, scratches, missing stylus, charger and usb-cover) I will try to get in this "bios" tomorrow. With this 6651 I can try more things because it is not a very big problem if that 6651 won't work anymore..

Maybe we could get wallythacker to try this on his extra 6651 too (at least until it's sold).



Nice dream, but I suspect that's a missing file problem.

I've tested with my second 6651 with the same results, I get the same 'bios'.

If you are in the bios thing and press the Opowerbutton (or twice or you pressed it a second) the 6651 will turn off. When pressing the powerbutton you automaticly will come in the bios again.
On AC power it is possible to remove the battery, the 6651 will run the bios thing on AC without battery!

I couldn't sleep the other night, so I experimented with various key combinations while resetting my Intermec.

Pressing: Space bar - Insert - K whilst resetting will bring up the diagnostic screen.
Pressing: Space bar - S - D - F ` whilst resetting will bring up the 'load card program' screen.

I've not found the patch card combination.

I guess the 'load card program' is looking for a file on the CF card. Does anyone have any idea what form this file might take?
And does anyone have anything higher than Rom version 4 on their machine?

I'd almost guess an nk.bin file with a CE image installed in it.

bit pointless to load a say, 16MB OS image into 32MB ram.

but I'll look, time to dive into MIPS assembly (ARM I can read in my sleep, x86 is quite OK too, so MIPS is next.)

and to sig3 owners (like CE Geek)... yea, sig3 can also load files off CF or SD (not sure which), will continue research on that one day. in 64MB ram it would not be too bad to load a minimal OS, which then looks for the rest of \windows mounted on SD card (or CF card).

edit: actually, same could be done for intermec, maybe. big maybe

Edited by cmonex 2008-07-30 2:55 PM