Learning EPROM programming.

It's been a long time since I've posted to this blog. It's overdue. Thanks to some birthday money contributed by several members of my family this year, I've invested in a few interesting pieces of *sort of* retro technology to learn something new:

  EPROM programming. EPROMS are UV erasable chips which were common in computers more than two decades ago. The goal of this learning project is as follows:

  * Program a replacement EPROM to replace the NTSC kernel with a PAL EEPROM in my Commodore C16 computer.
Along with a crystal replacement, this will allow the machine to play PAL (Europe) games.

  * Program a PIC chip for my WII to ATARI adapters. 
Not an EPROM, but this programmer will also program the PIC chips required for that project that was set aside when my existing programmer was incapable of doing the job.

  * Program a C64 JiffyDOS kernel for one of my Commodore C64s.
Technically, I have an EASYFLASH 3, with a virtual version, but it would be nice to say I've done this successfully.

  * Program a C64 cartridge game of some type.

  * Program replacment HI/LO EPROMs for my Commodore Plus4 with some useful software.

I've had to piece together a lot of information from various sources, so hopefully this blog will help someone else who decides to explore this somewhat lost art.   I suspect I will make mistakes along the way, so read everything to make sure I've not followed up with corrections in a later post.  More to follow.