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Old school Eprom & Prom programmer.

Muttley, can you tell us the model number of your scope? I can see from some earlier photos that it is Hantek brand, but which model?
 
Gary C said:
The serial data looks fine, Im just confused why your scope seems to say the signal is 80V peak to peak which is nonsense for RS-232. It should be 12V positive to 12V negative giving at most 24V peak to peak. Not sure what a serial port would make of 80V peak to peak, but I suspect its just the scope reading wrong. If it gave a nonsensical DC bias then I could see how that could happen, but peak to peak, it must be 24V max. A cheap serial to USB interface should do the job but make sure its compatible with your OS, as ones using the PL23xx seem to have windows 11.
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Well, my mistake. There was some settings in the scope wrong. I suppose i fix it somehow. Here is the new picture.

EBE61505-A606-4815-BB01-6674C7EDA8A9.jpeg


Gary C said:
A cheap serial to USB interface should do the job but make sure its compatible with your OS, as ones using the PL23xx seem to have windows 11.
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I have already Tera Term installed in my PC and also i have the USB to serial cable. The reason is because i use it for my Tauntek IC tester that is terminal based tester. The only think that missing is to build a cable for my programmer and of course the way to build it.

Now that we find the TX line, what next and what I should check please? :)

@SiriusHardware My scope is the Hantek DSO5102P. But as you read above was my mistake for the wrong measurements. Sorry.
 
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As its not a standard RS-232 connector, you will need to make up a lead.

I looks like an 8 pin din type A, so from the programmer to a 9 pin d sub connection

pin 8 to pin 5
pin 5 to pin 2
pin 4 to pin 1

But that is a guess. I would want to check the centre pin is 0v. You could find the pinout of the Z80 and check continuity between its 0V and the centre pin.
 
The scope is most likely one that doesn't "Auto-Sense" a 1x/10x probe. Most cheap scopes don't. There is a setting under the vertical channel settings to change between 1x & 10x type probes. All it does is change the scale factor of the readouts.
 
Gary C said:
The serial data looks fine, Im just confused why your scope seems to say the signal is 80V peak to peak which is nonsense for RS-232. It should be 12V positive to 12V negative giving at most 24V peak to peak.

Not sure what a serial port would make of 80V peak to peak, but I suspect its just the scope reading wrong. If it gave a nonsensical DC bias then I could see how that could happen, but peak to peak, it must be 24V max.

A cheap serial to USB interface should do the job but make sure its compatible with your OS, as ones using the PL23xx seem to have windows 11.
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He probably has it set to 10x probe mode with the lines directly connected
 
maxtherabbit said:
He probably has it set to 10x probe mode with the lines directly connected
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Yeah, thats what I asked him to check. In post #22 its looking better but still not quite RS232 standard.

If we can confirm the 0V line I think it should be easy to sort.

Once comms is working, it would be best to copy a rom into memory then try to send it to the PC, we can then see if it turns up in binary or Intel Hex
 
if you are using an ASCII terminal to communicate with the unit and control it then the code format will almost certainly be one which can be sent and captured as ASCII, either simple ASCII HEX or Intel Hex or Motorola 'S' - unless the unit has the ability to upload and download binaries using something like xmodem / ymodem or zmodem.
 
Gary C said:
I would want to check the centre pin is 0v. You could find the pinout of the Z80 and check continuity between its 0V and the centre pin.
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The ground is not the center pin. I have already found the center pin in my previous posts. I know that in my first photo you see that i use the center pin as ground but that was wrong. On all my last photos and videos i use the pin on the photo as ground. I also confirm that there is connectivity with pin 29 (ground) of z80 cpu.

Here is the photo:

6B285C17-730F-4A09-9676-F9001C070566.jpeg
 
I am onsite today (Gary, are you working today?).

The programmer I was thinking about was the EP8000:

Manual: http://matthieu.benoit.free.fr/pdf/GP EP8000 EPROM Emulator ProgrammerPart1.pdf

Datasheet: https://www.google.com/search?q=ep8...z=1C1GCEA_en&safe=active#imgrc=V1LQRx_cV57OVM (sorry, this is only the search).

This is clearly a much more 'upmarket' unit than what you have (a video output and parallel port) - but there are also similarities. I wonder if they did a cut-down version that is similar to what you have?

Dave
 
Thank you for that! I will start reading the manual and I believe that I get a help from that!

Have a great day!
 
As well as following up that lead, if you can get a terminal connected to the machine with the wiring and baud rate hopefully matched up, just try hitting return or HELP followed by return. It may list all of the available commands.
 
I *suspect* that the TL082 is the driver for the transmit from device to host (to host) and the LM339 is for the incoming data (from host). If you can either check the traces from the connector (would require taking board out of box, can’t tell if that is difficult or not) and see.
 
Not had any reply from the linkedin contact so its going to have to be trial and error.

So the first job is going to be to make a serial link and get it to receive data.

Do you have an RS232 connection to your computer ?
 
One other question, does Muttley have any other programmer which can read the EPROM which is in this NPS 512 unit? If he can post the code from it here there are people here (people cleverer than me, I should say) who could probably part-disassemble it to get some understanding of the command syntax the unit uses / expects.

Of course, this only applies if you have access to at least one other EPROM reader.
 
Hello all.

First, I have to say that maybe I am near to get the original software for the programmer! I speak with RELEC company and may have it and send it to me in near future. It was written in Z80 assembly language as they told me. They don’t swear that have the manual i am afraid and the reason is that they don’t get digital (pdf) copy of this at the past. Maybe found it in paper copy. If they found it they will send it also.

Now about the Eprom, yes I have a miniPro Eprom programmer so I will post here the code soon as possible!

Thank you and sorry for long wait. I was waiting the good news before made a new post.
 
Muttley, that sounds very hopeful, it sounds as the company means to help if they can. However, even if they can find it you might need a computer running DOS or an early version of Windows to run the support software.
 
Gary C said:
Do you have an RS232 connection to your computer ?
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Not yet. I order all i want to build one and i am in waiting mode!

Here is the .bin file (27c64) of NSP 512 Eprom programmer :)
 

Attachments

  • NSP_512_bin.zip
    6 KB · Views: 6
Hello all.

Bad news. There is no software available. They don’t have it any more. Maybe in the future they will find the manual. But to be honest, I don’t hear them at the phone very positive to help…
 
Sorry to hear that Muttley, it was worth a try anyway. There surely must be one other person in the world who has one of these?

I'm not quite clever enough to look through the ROM you posted to try to work out what the serial commands might be, hopefully someone else is.

In the meantime you should keep trying to get a connection between the unit and Teraterm - I would guess that it probably outputs some sort of prompt over the RS232 link when it is powered up or reset.
 
I couldn't resist taking a look but, while the content of the BIN file looks very structured - it looks as though it is full of look up tables, especially in the beginning and end portions - I can't see anything much in the way of what I would recognise as Z80 code. Can someone else take a look? Almost the first thing you'd expect to see is a jump (C3xxxx) at address 0000.

The IC to the right of the EPROM is a static RAM which will be the 'system' RAM, the 8 identical ICs strung out along the top row are 8K byte RAM chips and they will be there to support the unit's EPROM emulator function which allows it to be plugged into an EPROM socket instead of an EPROM - although a specific cable, probably missing, would be required in order to use that.

The Z0840004PSC uP, is it really just a standard Z80 - not a microcontroller version with internal code memory?
 
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