Anything I should know before flashing EPROMs?

[bluejay]

I'm finally home and I'm already greeted with my shiny new TL866II+ EPROM programmer along with a bunch of EPROMs and ATmega microcontrollers etc. I've read through the manual and it seems like I can simply select, for example, Atmel 27C512R from the dropdown list, select a .bin file I want to flash, then flash it. Is there anything else I should know before I start flashing stuff onto the EPROMs and microcontrollers? I have a few spares and I can wait a while since I can't even test them out right now because the PCBs haven't arrived yet. For now I'll try dumping a socketed ROM I can find in one of my computers that's compatible with the TL866II+. Thanks in advance?

[Shawn]

Atmel 27C512R? Isn't that an OTP chip?

[bluejay]

Yeah. Can't be erased. It's not that big a problem as long as I don't fuck something up, and I ordered a few spares in case I did.

 Oh, you thought I was referring to the 27C512R when I said EPROM? No, I was just referring to EPROM chips in general.

Edited November 30, 2020 by bluejay

[Shawn]

In the future you want to be sure to use EEPROM or UV EPROM chips. Using OTP is a real roll of the dice when first starting out. EEPROM and UV EPROM chips in the size range you are using can be had really cheap, probably cheaper than the OTP's if you got them from Mouser or Digikey. Find some flash chips on ebay from China and I'm sure you will be very happy with the price and performance. The Winbond flash chips those big resellers on ebay have a good to go. I've used shitloads of them. I'm sure others can chime in to the quality and pricing of them as well.

[CPUWIZ]

Yep.  Old PC motherboards have the BIOS on EEPROM's, if you have a 486 or 386 board laying around.  I got to pull them out of 30-40 machines at work one time, a long time ago, they still work.

[bluejay]

If you say so. I haven't months to spend so I'm not willing to risk delayed shipping from China for now. Yeah, I got those PROMs from Mouser and they were moderately expensive. I have a couple 286 PCs. Maybe I should hunt for the BIOS ROMs in the thing?

Anyways, I'm stuck with the 27C512Rs for now, and a bunch of ATmega microcontrollers. So I should just be able to load and flash my desired programs onto the chips?

[Shawn]

13 minutes ago, bluejay said:

If you say so. I haven't months to spend so I'm not willing to risk delayed shipping from China for now. Yeah, I got those PROMs from Mouser and they were moderately expensive. I have a couple 286 PCs. Maybe I should hunt for the BIOS ROMs in the thing?

Anyways, I'm stuck with the 27C512Rs for now, and a bunch of ATmega microcontrollers. So I should just be able to load and flash my desired programs onto the chips?

 

You have to set the flags on the micro controllers. Input the configs as well. Make sure to program each part of it to the right section of the chip. Speedpak shipping from China to the USA doesn't take months. It's only the slowboat shipping that takes months on end to get from Asia to North America. 

 

If you prefer to buy within your country, there are plenty of places within the USA that sell good EEPROMS and EPROMS. If I have any advise for you just getting started with chip programming it is to stay away from OTP until you have a good understanding of what you are doing. I have been burning chips with a good understanding of them for many years and I still avoid OTP, cause accidents happen. Doesn't even need to be user error. Any hiccups programing those things, be it a voltage drop, software error, whatever and the chip is useless.

[Shawn]

And yes, you should be able to load your binary into the programmer memory and burn it just fine. Your burner you have there will burn those chips without issue. I've done so myself in the past with the those exact chips using the programmer model one before what you have.

[bluejay]

I've narrowed down the issue with the SD2IEC design I made to the programming of the A284. I verified the PCBs were okay with schematics I found online. Thanks to solder paste and a hot air workstation the soldering job was clean other than rosin residue everywhere. Anyways I know it's not an issue, tested with a multimeter.

I'm given some options for me to choose from when programming the 1284:

A website I've found suggests that I should configure it like this:

and when I configured it like that, it didn't recognize the SD2IEC at all. But when I left it on default, it half works, as in it detects something connected as device #8 but it won't load anything. The power and drive activity LED doesn't come on, but I've made sure the VIC-20 is providing 5VDC into the thing and it's only not working because, again, an error while programming, since the LEDs are connected to couple of the microcontroller's data pins, not VCC or VDD itself.

There might also be an issue with the SD card slot, but I'm already low on spares so I want to make sure it isn't the microcontroller that's causing the issue before I use another.

So, what exactly do those options affect and how should I configure it?

Edited December 14, 2020 by bluejay

[bluejay]

I've figured out what they did and apparently the website lied; I have to leave the last 4 settings at default; it's what sets the clock speed at 8mhz which is the crystal that I have installed on the board. It's working now, and very well at that.