Hello,

I built my own programmer for the AT28C256, but it was slow, not 100% reliable, and a pain in the ass to use. So I picked up a T866II from Alibaba (it shipped from the US). Their website said my chip was supported, so I decided to give it a shot. It was about $50 including shipping, so it was a little bit of a risk.

The software is a bit clunky, but it does work. It takes less than 10 seconds to erase the chip, program all 32k of it, and then verify the write. It even turns off protection before writing and then turns it back on afterwards.

It really works well, and I thought I'd share in case anyone else was wondering about it.

Rick

I've got two of those (one of the old TL866+ and one of the newer TL866II) and love them, especially because they can be used under Linux via the minipro project. The TL866II even programs Atmel GALs which have traditionally been a bit of a pain as they use a proprietary algorithm and aren't well-supported by the cheaper programming hardware.

Can the newer ones program the GALs from Linux?

I have an older on - which (as a sort of warning to others who might buy them dirt cheap off ebay), turns out to be a clone - as I found out when I decided to hook it up to a Win PC to try to upgrade it - they deliberately bricked it, although it still runs under Linux.

Cheers,

-Gordon

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Gordon Henderson.
See my Ruby 6502 and 65816 SBC projects here: https://projects.drogon.net/ruby/

I haven't tried it in a while since I have moved on to Xilinix CPLDs, but when last I checked the minipro app didn't know how to read jed files and convert them to the binary stream needed to send to a GAL, and so you couldn't do those from Linux. Fortunately there's a DLL shim you can use that lets the official app run perfectly fine under WINE, and that's how I ended up doing it when I last worked with GALs.