EPROM and EEPROM Programmers

On Apr 30, 2012, at 4:38 PM, Rob Jarratt wrote: This affects the Xeltek software for their parallel port burners, but it may also affect other devices/manufacturers: most cheaply-developed EPROM burner software dates back to DOS and may have a GUI tacked on. The Xeltek software expects a parallel port at 0x378 (or alternately, at 0x278) that it can talk to directly. If you have something else (say, a PCI parallel port like I do, or certainly a USB one), you're not likely to have the parallel port there, and the Xeltek software bugs out. Newer software may behave better and use modern driver interfaces for talking to the parallel port, in which case any USB, PCI, PCMCIA, etc. device ought to work if the driver isn't totally broken. I do recall some USB parallel adaptors that only really worked with printers, mostly because of deficiencies in either the chipset or the driver. Most of those terminated with a Centronics plug instead of a DB-25. I solved my problem by making a VMWare image and telling VMWare that the PCI parallel port (which it could access just fine, thank you) should be located at the standard 0x378 in the guest machine. That works fine, though it's a little annoying to have to fire up a VM when I really just want to burn an EPROM. Still marginally better than having a dedicated machine for my legacy interfaces, which is something I still ponder from time to time. - Dave