Tip for people trying to get older EPROM programmers working
I got a second hand Needham's EMP-10 and wasn't able to get it to work in either Win98 or WinXP. After searching endlessly for help or some way to boot DOS on a laptop without a floppy drive, I stumbled on
https://rufus.akeo.ie/
which is a utility to make a USB flash drive bootable. It has several OS options, one of which was MSDOS so I used that, threw the EMP-10 software on there with all my ROM images and was up and running.
Of course you need a laptop or PC which has the ability to boot from a USB media device, and you won't have the luxury of networking or web browsing when booted to DOS but that to me was a small price to pay in this era of smartphones and multiple PCs/tablets in the home.
On the plus side you don't need any MSDOS or old Windows media and you don't need to re-install the OS or make a separate partition or anything on your PC. You don't even need an OS on your PC.
Anyway I thought it was helpful. My searches for help often times led to people who kept an old PC operational dedicated just to the EMP-10. I guess I have that too in a sense since none of my modern PCs have a parallel port, but it's just an old junky laptop that I can put in storage when I'm not using it and I don't have to worry about the OS on it flaking out.
I got a second hand Needham's EMP-10 and wasn't able to get it to work in either Win98 or WinXP. After searching endlessly for help or some way to boot DOS on a laptop without a floppy drive, I stumbled on
https://rufus.akeo.ie/
which is a utility to make a USB flash drive bootable. It has several OS options, one of which was MSDOS so I used that, threw the EMP-10 software on there with all my ROM images and was up and running.
Of course you need a laptop or PC which has the ability to boot from a USB media device, and you won't have the luxury of networking or web browsing when booted to DOS but that to me was a small price to pay in this era of smartphones and multiple PCs/tablets in the home.
On the plus side you don't need any MSDOS or old Windows media and you don't need to re-install the OS or make a separate partition or anything on your PC. You don't even need an OS on your PC.
Anyway I thought it was helpful. My searches for help often times led to people who kept an old PC operational dedicated just to the EMP-10. I guess I have that too in a sense since none of my modern PCs have a parallel port, but it's just an old junky laptop that I can put in storage when I'm not using it and I don't have to worry about the OS on it flaking out.
.
