Rednael wrote:
1. Does anyone know of a method of validating a ROM chip withouth having an EPROM programmer (and without having additional spare ROMs)?
You should be able to find a good copy of the ROM contents online;
http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/ ... uters/pet/ seems likely to have one.
As for dumping it, that's not complex. Pull the ROM, drop it into a breadboard, and wire all address lines, output enable and chip select (both of which are negative logic) to ground, and then hook up the power. Measure the voltage at each data pin to determine the byte at location 0 in ROM, and write that down. Then move A0 from ground to +5 and again measure the voltages at the data pins to get the byte at location 1. Continue in this way until you've determined the entire contents of the ROM. (Hey, I didn't say it was easy; just that it's not complex. :-))
More seriously, typically you program some sort of computer to do this (such as a cheap Arduino board) or buy a device already programmed to do such things (a PROM programmer). Since it sounds like you're going to get one anyway, the real question becomes what to do if the ROMs seem to be good.
In that case, one thought I have is to program a new EPROM with a bare minimum of code: just the reset vector pointing a location that has a branch or jump to itself, putting the machine in an infinite loop. You can then probe the board while that's running and see if you find the expected signals from that loop. If all looks ok, you can expand the code in your EPROM bit by bit to touch more memory locations, initialize other devices (with code copied from the Commodore EPROMs) and the like, until you find something that appears to be going wrong.