We've had quite a bit of interest in ROM X thanks to Joe Strosnider's video review. Joe added a number of notes underneath the video but I just wanted to clear up questions around the recovery mode.

You can test this no problem - pull the jumper and turn on the computer - it will do the memory test then display the recovery menu. Press a key 1-9, A-F to boot using the selected ROM image.

As long as you reinstall the jumper BEFORE running ROMX.DISK then you are good - everything is back to normal, and the existing menu will remain intact if you were to the use a feature within ROMX.DISK that writes settings or data to flash.

If you were to reinstall the jumper AFTER running ROMX.DISK then the current version of ROMX.DISK would warn you that it cannot find the ROMX board and thus will show no current descriptions. It WOULD erase the descriptions if you tried to update any settings. This is because all the descriptions are stored in the firmware image and if it can't load existing descriptions from the firmware image it sets them to blanks.

Normally you would only use recovery mode to recover the firmware after a bad update (power outage mid update etc).

A few people have asked whether a //e version will follow. Short answer is yes - an Apple //e version is on the drawing board, and will include the same text ROM switching capability, though I've found a few more fonts available for the //e so we may possibly increase the number of text ROM slots. An Apple //c version may follow the //e, but to be honest I havent looked far into the //c version just yet.

If you are interested in a //e version, drop me a line - it would be good to get a feel for numbers.

We are currently building ROM X in small batches of 20 units. The second batch of ROM X production boards is shipping now - almost half have been sold - email me if you are interested.