help me get a eprom burner

discgolfer72

discgolfer72

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im in the market for a burner and really dont know where to start i really just want one so i can burn my own vs and pc 10 roms
adn mabey do some other small arcade pcb work
what would everyone suggest id like one thats usb and the cheaper the better
any good sites that take paypal to order from with good shipping preffer new and i hate feebay
 
I recently bought a Willem EPROM programmer PCB SMT version PCB5.0 off of the bay. I'm new to the whole burning thing, but I'm getting a sense that this is a piece of crap. I can't even burn a whole set of Vs. EPROMS. I've only burned 2 successfully.:(

I will watch this thread for better options since I have read bad reviews here on the Willem.
 
I've been looking into the GQ-4X as well, it's a few generations past the willem 5.0 at this point. I'd be interested to hear how things have been going with the latest version.

-Hans
 
I've been thinking about getting one of those GQ-4X burners as well. As someone who's never used one before, is there a steep learning curve to operate this? I could use it to finish my Punisher board resurrection and possibly to get my Blasteroids board up and running as well. Beyond that I'd probably use it for VS chip set burning. I assume you can use it to read eprom data and then you could somehow compare it to a good mame set?
 
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You install everything. Install the driver for the programmer before installing the software.

Once it's installed, you fire up the software. Select the type of device you're trying to read. Click "Read". Save what is read to a file, named something logical based on the board you pulled it from and the chip location, i.e. dk.5b.bin. Save the file to your MAME directory.

Then, you open up a command prompt and do "mame dk.5b.bin -romident" and it will check the database and attempt to identify the rom for you. If it matches anything, it will tell you what it matches. If you get NO MATCH, either you have a rare and unknown-to-the-mame-team rom, or a bad eprom. Sometimes you can blank and reburn them with the right rom image, sometimes you need to replace the chip itself.

It's pretty easy to do, but it took me an hour or two of futzing around and trying things to figure out how to do stuff.
 
Hmm. I'd not heard of the GQ-4x before. Looks interesting. Unfortunately, I don't have a computer that can run the software. Anyone tried using the software in Wine under Linux?

I'm still sticking by my trusty old Needham's PB-10 though. I love that programmer. Fast, reliable, compatible... I can't say enough good things about it. The software that runs it is so nice and easy to use. And it does all the old chips, and all the way up to 8mbit EPROMs. I've even built my own adapter setup to allow me to do 16 bit wide EPROMs.

-Ian
 
No need to go through eBay if you don't want to either. MCUMall makes them, so you can get them through their site as well. They have a pretty helpful forum as well. They sell one with more adapters, but I haven't needed an adapter yet, so I don't know if any of them are needed for arcade stuff.

http://www.mcumall.com
 
Yes, it does 2532 no problem.




steph said:
Do they do 2532 ?

The device list says "2532 Test",
which I would guess means read-only, but not write.

2532s are pretty popular in arcade games
(PacMan, DK, All Williams and most Bally video sound boards, etc... ).

That would be an important consideration...

Steph
Click to expand...
 
Just be sure your computer's operating system is supported for the software.

My shop PC is WinXP, the computer room is Vista, and the new laptop is Win7. There can be a lot of headaches with trying to use programmers that aren't supported on a particular OS.
 
Yeah, that's a good point. The software was a bit wonky on my Vista machine, but works like a champ on my XP box. Others have said it works fine on their Vista machine, so I might've messed up my install somehow.
 
channelmanic said:
Just be sure your computer's operating system is supported for the software.

My shop PC is WinXP, the computer room is Vista, and the new laptop is Win7. There can be a lot of headaches with trying to use programmers that aren't supported on a particular OS.
Click to expand...

the big question is will it work on win 7 with virtual xp

but really i do have 4 or 5 old athlon xp motherboards with cpu's (1.6 ghz)
that i used to use for softmoding the original xbox (creating and formating larger harddrives drives ) so iguess ican always load up xp on one of them


right now 95$ is a little expensive for my needs
any burners that will work for the pc10 and vs chips that are in the 50$ range
i like somthing cheap i can learn on then if i get good (and more cash lol) ill splurge on a nice full use one

i also was reading up on making my own and what i found is someone making aburner using a old atari anyone ever heard of this
http://www.atarimagazines.com/v4n8/EPROMBurner.html



what about this one
http://cgi.ebay.com/PCB5-0-Willem-E...tem&pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item53d99837d9
 
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It works fine on Win7. I burned a couple 2532s and 2732s in the last couple of months with no problems. You will need an external power supply to burn some of the 2764s though. It worked for me on vista as well, but I don't remember if it worked on 64bit.
 
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