anyone out there

[Bruce Plecan]

Personally real time ain't an issue.  I document all the changes I make, and
just change "maybe" a dozen entries.  So i to turn the engine off and
reboot, that's fine.
  For me it's $$.  If something could be built for $30-50, and perferably
less,
so much the better.  If a board is needed, or saves a bunch of time, fine
then a board it is.  The cheapest 512K I've seen was like $129, so if
reasonably less
then that's what I want.
  Cutting a memcal apart to run a cable and use a "ugly" box to do it is
fine with me.  It still beats having to come in the house for each burn.
  Maybe having a reliable as a rock basic one working, will lead to a
refinement, with real time, ALDL accesssible, yada yada.
Bruce

snipped and clipped brutely
>However, I have spent some time trying to learn about the CPLD as
>discussed in Ludis' email. Unfortunately, I'm having a tough time
>locating a "basic theory of use and operation" guide on PLD's.
>I start thinking about thrashing bits around and filling / retrieving
>addresses. I think about sending the commands (like xFFF, xFFD, xFFC)
>and then sending data to fill addresses. That's where my black box

>Of course, I have delinquent thoughts on a (shrug...) low tech parallel
>port based dumb (no uC) semi-emulator. I have all the parts for it in my
>junk bin, and it would just be a matter of building it. I say
>semi-emulator because it's not a true "real time" data changer, it's
>almost just a pair of flash chips in parallel with buffers, selectable
>Bank "A" or Bank "B", that you send a binary image (or pieces thereof)
>to. Pretty simple/basic/old stuff. Premise of operation is that you
>could have two different images loaded, switch between the two (manually
>or electronically), have one bank as "experimental", etc... Load time
>wouldn't be too terrible (minute or so?), but advantage would be that
>you wouldn't have to ever go back to an EPROM programmer again. Just
>have a DB-25 cable hanging out of the ECM to plug in to the parallel
>port. I do believe that this deviates from what the original intent of
>the "EPROM Emulator" was for, though. I believe that the "original
>intent" was to have a near-real time changeable data bank...