Emailing CP-M Z80 home brew computer circuit board.htm

[Ethan Dicks]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 09:01:27AM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On Jun 17, 2008, at 9:40 PM, Alexandre Souza wrote:
> >   Because every hardware hacker should have one (along with an  
> >EPROM emulator :D)
> 
>   I've got a PROMICE by Grammar Engine, Inc., but I've not yet  
> managed to put together a box-to-target cable.  I should do that soon.

Dave,

If you need any help with your PromICE, let me know.  I worked with
the founder of Grammar Engine years ago, and I have used their
ROMulator and PromICEs extensively (we used to help them out back
when VMS support was relevant - they would bring their download
code over, and we'd compile it for them).

Theirs was the first EPROM emulator I worked with, and I have to
say the experience was fanstastic.  Our first target was a VAXBI
COMBOARD - with EPROMs, we'd have to shut down the VAX and remove
the board *plus* all the usual edit-compile-burn time, then put
it all back and restart the VAX - about an hour cycle time to
fix a bug.  With the PromICE, since we booted our target board
anyway as part of the normal use cycle (not common in embedded
boards, but ours used host-bus-downloaded application code, so
we soft-booted our boards *lots*), the makefile handled the
compile-download-boot phase by itself, and our turnaround time
was more like 5 minutes.

It made debugging go really, really smoothly, especially when we
were having problems with one particular sort of VAXBI cycle.

Cheers,

-ethan

-- 
Ethan Dicks, A-333-S     Current South Pole Weather at 18-Jun-2008 at 13:10 Z
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Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov            http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html