New toy, an old, autonomous working Eprom Burner, a Needham's SA-20 ...
Monday, January 21, 2013, 11:30 PM
Posted by Administrator
That was really tricky.
I buyed an old but autonomous working Eprom Burner, a Needham's SA-20 (Wilke Technology), and I hoped to work with it connected to my modern PC (which has a COM1 interface).
Unfortunately only a DOS program exists so far for it (but there is hope, source code of that DOS program is included). So I decided to give it a chance by using VMWare Player with installed Windows 98 SE. I tried also pure DOS mode. But it worked only partly and slow.
It seemed my key strokes were eaten somewhere, or another reason exists for a painful slow remote PC control via serial interface (115K baud,N,8,1 - that's fast enough usually).
Trying to use it with a Intel 486 driven Siemens Notebook and DOS from Windows 95B worked like a charm. But look at this beauty. It can copy 8 EPROMs at once !
If someone has an explanation for that strange serial interface behaviour, I would really please you to share your knowledge. Serial port setup in VMWare used "host device" mode.
I found also a very helpful site describing made expirience with a parallel port connection, so I tried only using it via serial interface.
See related link below for that article...