Hi,
> IMHO, more important than the EPROM programmer is an
>EPROM emulator....
Good point, and the exact reason I picked up a "Softy S3" about 10 years
back (which is in SERIOUS need of TLC unfortunately).
Great little unit, it's an EPROM programmer/emulator in a package about the
size of a large pocket calculator. Dump your code into it via a serial port
and enter emulation mode for testing, when you're done just drop in a blank
EPROM and hit the "burn" button. :-)
I really should get this thing working again....
TTFN - Pete.
Anyone with a 8 inch drive available. I'd prefer
DS/DD but frankly anything considered. I'm trying
to put together an external 8" drive for a PC to
allow archiving of 8" disks.
Reply of list.
Many thanks.
Ian.
____________________________________________________________________________________
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I'm going to be up in Seattle next week on Sun/Mon/Tue for the Microsoft
GameFest developer event. I think there's some time on one of the
evenings where there isn't a party scheduled :-). Anyone care to meet
for a beer or something?
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>
Pete Turnbull said:
> On 05/08/2007 21:10, Tony Duell wrote:
>>> Hire a genny.
>>
>> How stable is the frequency of such a unit? Remember many larger disk
>> drives have their spindle speed set by mains freqeucy.
>
> To say nothing of the fact that the output is often nothing like a sine
> wave, and many devices don't take kindly to that.
Thanks to Yorkshire Electricity Distribution Ltd. being bloody useless, I
am considerably more intimate with my building's generator than I was a
few short weeks ago, so this is a subject close to my heart!
Anyway, the long and the short is that gennys certainly can produce
reliable power - more reliable than YEDL, anyway. Our unit is an Iveco
6l 4-stroke diseasel driving a MarelliMotori genset, generating 150Kva
of 440v 3phase. Output voltage and frequency are programmable, and
frequency stability calibration is documented in the manual.
Modern gennies would be more than capable of doing the job, and should be
readily available for short-term lease. You'd be surprised how quiet and
clean-running they are as well.
Fuel isn't cheap though; IIRC running it at ~75% load it uses something in
the order of 200 litres/day of diesel; it should be OK to use red diesel
in a genny I think (for non-UKers - red diesel is diesel on which
fuel tax hasn't been paid,) but you're still looking at a fair old cost.
Oh, and to answer the original question - I'm up noorf in Yorkshire,
although I'd actually prefer such an event to be in London. I'd be
interested in going if it does happen, anyway.
Cheers,
Tim.
PS. Word of advice - check the fuel controller pump relay. Nothing more
annoying than being woken up at 3am because a poxy 5 quid relay has stuck
and caused the header tank to run dry. Voice of bitter experience there
;-). (On the bright side, if that does happen I can now show you how to
hand-prime a dry diesel engine :^).)
--
Tim Walls at home in Leeds
EMail & MSN: tim.walls at snowgoons.com
I finally got around to reverse engineering and understanding my PCjr
bus to 8 bit ISA bus adapter. The details are here:
http://www.brutman.com/PCjr/pcjr_isa_adapter.html
If you are interested give it a read and send me your comments; I'm kind
of interested in making sure that I've not written something blatantly
wrong. In the interest in keeping the noise level here low please
consider whether a comment should be public or off-list ...
Thanks,
Mike
>
>Subject: Re: newbie building a scratch-built computer
> From: Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com>
> Date: Sun, 05 Aug 2007 14:54:42 -0400
> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts Only" <cctech at classiccmp.org>
>
>On Aug 5, 2007, at 4:16 AM, Gordon JC Pearce wrote:
>>> Not the best choice, IMHO, a better one you might find at
>>> www.willem.org.
>>> There are commercial clones as well, like the one from
>>> www.silvotronic.de
>>> (board, kit available through ePay for instance). I have bought a
>>> kit from
>>> them and they work fine.
>>
>> One caveat with the willem programmers is that there really is only
>> Windows software available for them. It works well under Wine with a
>> bit of messing about.
>
> That in itself is a good reason to avoid them, in my opinion. I
>have two or three useless PC-based EPROM programmers sitting in
>various boxes in the garage. They're useless because the
>manufacturer has orphaned them (or just plain gone out of business)
>and I either lost the software, or it only runs under some release of
>Windows that isn't easily available anymore. (and I'll be damned if
>I'm going to have a Windows machine here just to run an EPROM
>programmer!)
>
> Anything worth doing is worth doing right. Get a standalone
>device programmer, not one that pretends to be a computer
>peripheral...or worse yet, a "Windows PC peripheral". With a real
>device programmer, you won't get locked into the whims of the
>manufacturer (at least not as easily), or worse yet, the whims of
>Microsoft. Having an important tool depend on an unreliably,
>proprietary operating system from one manufacturer who is well-known
>for sleazy business practices sure doesn't sound to me like a smart
>way to run.
>
> I used a Data I/O 2900 for many years, and I absolutely loved it.
>I recently replaced it with a Data I/O Unisite...a big beefy one with
>a hard drive. It's Good Stuff(tm) and can program pretty much
>anything. When designing or repairing something, I never have to
>stop and worry about whether or not I can program a particular
>device. These machines have floppy drives, and can deal with DOS-
>formatted disks (which most anything can write) and understand
>literally dozens of different file formats. They can also be
>remotely controlled via a *STANDARD* serial port, and the protocol is
>simple and openly documented.
>
> Like I said...anything worth doing is worth doing right.
DataIO is nice but if you don't have one the next best is anything that
has an interface that is easily coded for or the code is available.
I use a S100 Prommer and have the sources so the end result was a
SBC880, RAM-17 and an old 4slot mother using a PC power supply to
make a dedicated programmer with a serial port to any host. The
nice part about Eproms is they are standardized.
Allison
>
>Subject: Re: newbie building a scratch-built computer
> From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell)
> Date: Sun, 05 Aug 2007 21:21:07 +0100 (BST)
> To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
>
>[EPROM emulatoros]
>
>> *) Maybe your and my programming strategy differs; now with SW emulators
>> for almost any old CPU being available ona PC, I tend to test my code in
>
>It does. Remember I don't have anything that will run such an emulator at
>anything like a reasonable speed.
For test reasons often not a requirement to run at near real speeds.
Sometimes slower is good for testing, most sims can do things even
a hardware front pannel would envy. Usually I use a spare 486dx/66,
certainly not lightining fast but enough to test to see if the code
even runs and usually decently fast. the P1mmx/166 I use for email
and stuff runs Myz80 and Dunfields NS* Horizon (4mhz z80) and
CUBIX (6809) SIMs all run close to or better than real speeds.
Thats good enough considering the tools they provide as an offset
if any.
>Anyway, I like to write little test programs to run on the target
>hardware (maybe just outputing a message through the serial port, or
>blinking some LEDs, or...). Just to make sure the target is doing
>something sensbile.
I prefer to run on hardware too but, there are times when a my 486/75
laptop is at hand and I'm way from my bench so why not?
Allison
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anyone who might be interested in Priming the PUmp.
> > They're made of copper, but they're also plated with iron, and once that
> > plating is gone the copper doesn't last -- it gets pitted, etc. On really
> > old stuff I used to file tips, but not any more...
>
> Back in the old days, we used to coat the copper tips with silver
> (hard) solder (56% silver) to extend the life. But you need a torch
> to do that--silver solder melts at about 1100F and requires a special
> flux.
For what I believe was a short time back in the mid-late-70's, Weller came out with gold-flashed
soldering iron tips. They seemed to last forever and kept a tin like a dream which might have
been one of the reasons they discontinued them (i.e. tip sales reduced). Mine might still be
usable today if they hadn't been lost in one of my trans-national moves (along with a large
collection of soldering equipment and aids).
____________________________________________________________________________________
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