28 Aug
2007
28 Aug
'07
2:08 p.m.
On 8/28/07, Philip Pemberton <classiccmp at philpem.me.uk> wrote:
On 8/5/07, Brad Parker <brad at heeltoe.com>
wrote:
That's very nice.
It was wonderful. I did a few different boot
proms with one. Very handy.
It was made by (I think) Grammer Engine. Try www.promice.com. But
gosh, they do seem more expensive now that I remember...
Ah, but it's so much fun to build your own:
http://piclist.com/images/boards/EPROMemuMk2/index.htm It'll do any 27xx chip from 2764 through 27512,
and smaller chips with a
passive adapter. I built it to go with my 6502 computer board, and for rapid
firmware testing and debugging it's a great tool. It's also good for Gameboy
cartridge code development :)
I do see one advantage of the PromICE over your device - what you
have is _excellent_ for 8-bit targets, but my first-ever project
involving an EPROM emulator was with a 68010 processor, thus a need
for a wider emulation path.
Of course, you _can_ just take two units and stick one in each socket,
but then you need two free serial ports, etc.
I don't say this to denigrate your project - it really is slick. I'm
sure it works beautifully at 8-bits. It's more of a caution to folks
following this thread to keep width in mind when shopping or designing
an emulator of their own.
The source code is a bit of a mess, and the uploader
is Windows-specific, but
it works quite nicely. Rewriting the uploader isn't a big job either, just
that it works well enough for me and I see no reason to embark on a mass rewrite.
If I had one of your emulators, I'd certainly at least port the
uploader to UNIX. It's not like a CLI tool has that many differences
from Window to UNIX (presuming you didn't write a
GUI tool, in which
case, you just strip out the complicated stuff and stick an
fopen() or
two at the top ;-) OTOH, my first cross-compiling environment was VAX
to MC68K, so we even had to roll our own app for the ROMulator.
Fortunately, Grammar Engine had a few VMS customers, so they were
happy to leave in the #ifdev VMS code, and we were happy to compile
and link the uploader app for them gratis, especially since Arvind
used to work for us. I had the pleasure of using the ROMulator on our
VAXBI COMBOARD, and given the 20-minute down-up cycle of our VAX 8200,
the ability to swap out our COMBOARD firmware without powering down
the VAX was an *immense* time savings. It probably shaved a week or
two off the firmware development time. I've been a huge fan of
emulators ever since, commercial or homebrew.
-ethan