26 Jan
2012
26 Jan
'12
11:17 p.m.
On 26 Jan 2012 at 16:03, David Riley wrote:
Given all these factors, Xeltek's modern line
isn't too bad. They
usually support lots of devices as well, including a lot of vintage
ones. They're pricey, though; I've hung on to my old parallel port
one (SuperPro 280) that requires me to put a PCIe parallel port in my
machine and then run XP in a VM so it thinks that the port is at 0x378
just because I spent a pretty penny on it when it was new and I know
it works very well (curiously, though, their NMC9306 algorithm is
wrong and there appears to be no way to fix it).
I just grabbed a cheap Neoware thin client which still has parallel
and serial ports. It'll boot off of the internal flash or a USB pen
drive. Small, has its own internal power supply, so I don't mind
relying on it to run the Xeltek.
It looks as if most of Xeltek programming software hasn't changed in
look and feel for a very long time. Even the DOS-mode software
closely resembles the Windoze stuff.
One very cool aspect of the Xeltek stuff is that you can drop some
house-numbered TTL DIP into the socket and it'll try to identify it.
It doesn't work for the more complex logic, such as 74181s, but it
picked up a couple Fujitsu chips that I could not identify.
There's another Chinese brand out there that appears to be a bit more
professional that the usual junk--the "Wellon" line. They claim a
lot of devices, but I know nothing about them other than that.
--Chuck