Kudos, people!
This is what
team-work can do!
These are the benefits of the 'us' mentality versus the 'I' mentality!
Kudos to every individual who has been involved in this project!
Also, shame to every one of them for temping me to throw some more cash in to
that market (which is killing
our market)!
Let me throw my two cents in, by treating the thread with some food for thought:
There is an Actel ProASIC3 FPGA on board, hardwired to a twenty-slot ten-resistors network. This resistor network probably constitutes some kind of a revision number word, with each resistor pulling up or down a certain data line if the data word is ten-bits long, or leaving that line tri-stated also if the data word is twenty-bits long. This data word is --most probably-- read by the aforementioned FPGA and reported to the main processor.
This might not be easily spotted in the firmware disassembly listings because that data word is not read by the processor's I/O ports directly, but by the FPGA I/Os and reported via some (DMA, most likely) channel data burst, since the specific FPGA in question seems to be some kind of external memory manger accessing the Spansion FLASH boot and data storage memory chip.
Though I have not yet seen what's inside the DS2000 firmware (nor do I own a DS2000 unit in order to investigate it any further) I would consider the possibility of the FW actively reading that hardware jumpers revision word existing on the PCB in order to decide whether it should enable certain functions (like the 50 Ohm one, for example) or not.
If this is true, it could make it possible for the end user to be reverting their hardware on demand between the various revisions (i.e. non-A/A/AS or whatever) by just modifying the PCB revision number word jumpers (by adding in or by removing the jumper-resisrors that correspond to the data word bits).
-George