This has to be the ultimate retro chip tester

well hello everyone and welcome back to adrian's digital basement on today's video i'm going to be building up a pcb project and it's this these are all the parts for the rctp or the retro chip tester pro i showed this thing on a super mini mail call video on the second channel recently and i'm going to be using this to try to test some of the ics in the trs-80 model 2. that's what i'm pointing to over there i'm hoping that this thing is going to be useful in trying to figure out what's wrong exactly with the tiara city and why it's not starting up so without further ado let's get right to it [Music] so on the bench i have the soldering iron i have solder i have some wick to clean off the tip i have one of these things here that hold a pcb and typically when you use one of these things you need to use some tape over the components so when you flip it around all the parts don't fall out and in case you haven't watched the super mini mail call video the lovely viewer that sent in the retro chip tester pro bagged up all the parts for it so everything i need should be in here every single part so i'm going to load up the build instructions on the computer here and i'm going to set up the cameras for a little bit of a time lapse sit back relax and enjoy about five hours of work in about five minutes if you want to skip over this part click the time link in the description assembling large projects like this requires you to be really organized it was super helpful that all of the parts for this project were already individually bagged so i didn't need to sort those out first the bags all were labeled with exactly what the parts were inside as well i worked one build sheet at a time making sure to take inventory of all the parts that were bagged and match them up to what was on the build sheet i also marked on the build sheet anytime there were more parts in the bag than were required which meant i would have spares [Music] for a project that has a lot of the same component with the same value i tend to just install all of that one component at once as an example in this project there were a lot of 470 ohm resistors so i counted up on the build sheet how many there were i made sure i had that exact amount ready to go on the bench and then i installed them all in the board making sure that i had none left over when i was done for components where there's only a few or a couple or even one of each i will batch those together but i make sure i mark it off on the build sheet so that i keep track of exactly what i've installed in this case i also put a check mark on the bag that the component came in just to make sure that i know that there was nothing left i also make sure that i take the bag once i'm done with it and i put it on the floor or take it off the bench so i don't get confused later on [Music] this pcb was also marked with the values of the components that went into it or in the case of diodes or transistors the part number the layout of the board was also very logical making it very easy to find the component locations [Music] you'll notice i'm using those magnetic trays used for car repair and you can pick those up at the auto parts store i really recommend them to hold things like the off cuts or even the individual components in the case of this project i was supplied with usually the exact amount of components required for each type so the magnetic trays came in really handy to make sure i didn't lose a part on the floor or something here i'm finished with the first sheet and i'm admiring how much work i actually did now it's time to start the second page so time for another inventory of the parts i really have to thank the viewer who sent this in because every single component was perfectly bagged and there was not a single thing that was missing to build up this entire project here you'll see i'm using painters tape or sometimes blue tack to hold components into the board as i flip them over for things like resistors and diodes i'll bend the leads so they'll stay in place but sometimes the leads are too short to do that so that's where these other things come in handy [Music] there were three types of t092 packages those are the little packages that transistors typically come in and the board was very clearly marked for which type of package went where the leads of the transistors are relatively close together on the board once you insert them so soldering them can be a little tricky just to make sure you don't create solder bridges the only small issue i ran into when building this was there's one bulk capacitor on the power supply rail and it's under the lcd screen and the way the instructions tell you to install it is standing straight up like you normally would but when i test fit the lcd screen i found that the capacitor actually hit the bottom of the screen so i had to remove the original capacitor and install a new one with it lying on its side so it wouldn't hit the screen i really have to applaud the creator and or maintainer of this project because the assembly instructions were very clear and it pointed out a couple of the little gotchas you might have with very clear photographs so thank you very much for the wonderful documentation [Music] and the final step is to install the sd card module which with the default pins on it actually would make it stick straight up off the board so i desoldered the original angled pins and installed some perpendicular straight types so that when i stuck it onto the connector it would lie flat against the tester okay build is complete i ended up going with the number four dc to dc converter there were three different options but this one appeared to be the most capable how about i peel off this tape off the screen oh yeah oh yeah there it is i appreciate that there's a volume potentiometer here for the buzzer so you can turn it down if it's annoying normally you'd have to stick tape or something over these to shut them up i did end up with these extra parts like there's this six pin header here for i sp is that what it is in circuit programming yeah i had one with a shroud so i installed that instead on the underside i haven't cleaned it yet i figured i will do some quick testing make sure it works and then i'll try to clean all this flux off the bottom of the board you'll notice that i installed all sorts of connectors for power input there's a micro usb a regular size usb and then a dc barrel jack if you don't have the dc to dc converter and you need some voltages that aren't provided by it you can use these screw terminals here for 5 volts minus 5 volts and 12 volts i'm just giving the board one more inspection on the bottom make sure i've soldered every connection and nothing has shorted together looks like i only soldered one pin onto the header for the micro usb card and that is it i think i'm really ready to power this thing up now for the first power up of the board i'm going to use my bench power supply at 5 volts limited to 500 milliamps that way in case i have something wrong and there's a short i'm not gonna put like three amps into this thing and blow it up the manual indicates that this is center positive so i'm just double checking that i am putting five volts into the positive pin and i guess we're ready to go i have the power turned off so we'll slide that into the barrel jack and here we go all right well the screen lit up but we're not seeing anything but that's not a problem there is a little potentiometer here so let's adjust that uh-oh all right well if i turn the potentiometer all the way to one side it does work but boy this lcd is hard to read and also the backlight is sort of flickering on it okay i think i realize the problem right now the actual uh input power right now is 2.1 volts at 500 amps so obviously um the dc dc converters are doing their thing because the microcontroller is running but i'm going to need to increase the current a little bit okay there we go now it's working properly power supply is putting out 5 volts now at 328 milliamps i don't know it got kind of stuck in a in a weird current limiting mode well it's cool to see that the dc and dc converters are doing their job they were creating a 5 volt rail even though no 5 volts was available on the input anyhow as you can see the microcontroller is absolutely running let's see if i can figure out how to use this reset okay there's the firmware i probably need to update the firmware all right see the interface there's a select and a jump button that seems to kind of go back and forth in this menu so cyprus and between uncommon and cypress and then when you hit ok it actually goes into that menu so if we go to dram common now we have two 104 2107 4016 2018 4416 and a 4164. this is very typical for the commodore 64. well now that i know this thing seems to be working at least from a rudimentary standpoint i'm going to figure out how to use it and then i'll come back and show off what it can do all right it is the next day and i've had time to get to know this thing and boy do i like it it's pretty amazing the amount of things it can test so no more bench supply i'm going to be powering this up from my usb power bank so the micro usb connector on the side is extra useful there it is now right off the bat one thing you may notice is that the screen is much brighter and much more readable a couple reasons for that first of all i switched out to a different lcd module i found the one that was included with this thing was just not a very good lcd it had very bad viewing angles and the contrast overall was just not good but even with this one which is a little bit better the backlight brightness was incredibly bad well turned out that under the lcd was a 220 ohm dropper resistor in case you were using a screen that didn't have a built-in dropper resistor this one and the other one i did both have dropper resistors on board so you just hook five volts directly up to the anode cathode connection for the backlight so what i did is leave that resistor in place but i simply jumped it right here with a little piece of offcut and that bypassed it allowing full five volts to go to the backlight let's try testing a few things i haven't even done that yet on video i have a couple ram chips here both of these are four one one six or 16 kilobit times one bit ram chips this one has a part number 5290 but it's actually a 4116 testing dram chips is not something i've ever been able to do because you need a dedicated tester that supports refreshing the chips not to mention these particular dram chips require multiple voltages not just 5 volts of course with this fancy dc dc converter we have 12 volts 5 volts and minus 5 volts all available on this board it has three different voltage rails and there's actually minus 12 volts available right here so in conjunction with the voltage regulator you can get the necessary voltage that some other ics use if it's not the three that are provided of course this type of dram uses these three rails so that's all available right here on the socket so we go over to dram common and then we select four one one six it shows that this chip is using three different voltage rails and with the chip inserted in the socket we just push ok and the testing begins and there are some relays under here under the sd card that switch in the appropriate voltages to this ic there we go test pass so i'm going to draw a little tick mark on there just so i know that's a good chip it's pretty sweet to be able to test these chips finally outside of a computer because i don't have something i can easily stick these into to test they're typically used on really old machines like the commodore pets stuff from the late 70s and very early 80s next up we have another dram to check this is a 4 4 64 chip means that it is 64 kilobits times four bits as opposed to a standard one bit chip like these so when you're at this screen just hit any other button and that exits out and we can go select the chip we want four four six four sixty four kilobit times 4 and hit ok what's cool about this tester is it doesn't send voltage to this socket until the test begins and you'll see this light down here turns on the vcc light so that means that you don't risk shorting anything out while you take chips in and out of the socket all right this chip passed as well so i'll put a tick mark on there now for the video i sped up the test cycle so it happened a lot more quickly but if you think about the speed of the test compared to the 16 k by one chips there are four bits here versus one bit and there's also four times the size right 16k times four so it takes about 16 times longer to test this chip than it did this one so this tester is not really ideal for large-scale testing of tons and tons of chips but for quick testing before i install something into a machine it's pretty good all right how about a venerable 4-164 chip this is typical for what's in a commodore 64. so we just go back 4164 and hit start all right another good chip so i'll put a check mark on that so i know it is good all right so testing regular dram chips it's cool but it's certainly not all this thing can do how about testing this it's a sip a one megabyte sip i have no way to actually test these except for sticking them in a computer that uses sips i think i only have like one old 386 motherboard or 386sx motherboard that uses these but how exactly am i going to test this inside this socket well with this which is one of the adapters that was included with this thing plugs into the 32 pin socket here and then it gives you access to both sip and 30 pin sim testing now from reading to manual it only supports up to one megabyte module so you cannot test four or 16 megabyte modules i assume that's just a software thing also though the testing even for the one meg is very slow so a 4 or 16 meg module would probably be excruciatingly slow so we just stick it in just like that back in the main menu we scroll to dram uncommon and we scroll through the various choices here and there it is 30 pin sim p for parity and there's also one without parody and it supports the 256k version as well so we're gonna pick parity because there are nine chips on here there's parity and we're gonna hit start and there it goes now we wait it's a very slow test if you think about this has one megabyte times eight compared to the very slow test where is it of this 64 times four at 64k times four well there's a lot more memory to test here while we test this sip in here let's take a look at this database that's included this is actually a file that comes with the documentation and it's not online so you can copy this onto your phone or your tablet so you can just access this at any time even while you're off the internet you just type in whatever ic you're looking to test so 75 245 this is of course an octal bus transceiver and it says it's supported as a version 14 of the firmware i have version 19 on this device right now it also lists alternative part numbers that it can test under the same profile so i just have a sheet here full of some chips let's just type in a couple of these part numbers and see what can actually be tested on here 573 let's see if that can be tested i'm not even sure what that chip is there it is 573 is an octal d latch and that's worked since version 15. here's an lp339n whatever that is doesn't seem that this is actually found let's just quickly look up what this chip is all right no wonder why i can't test this analog comparator yeah that's impossible to test because it's an analog circuit how about this chip here the sn74156 this chip is from 1970 super old no idea what that chip is 74 156 dual two lined four line decoder multiplexer with open collector is working since version 15. how about the 74 ls 163 that's a synchronous 4-bit binary counter with synchronous clear working as of 19. so that's this firmware that's on here by the way this is still running the test uh so that means that stuff is routinely being added all the time why don't we grab that ship for testing along with this 1971 ic here speaking of firmware updates on this thing i actually tried to update to the latest firmware which happens to be version 20 and i ran into some issues there's actually no way to update the form around here using the microsd card you have to use this isp or in-circuit programming port with an external atmel programmer i had a usb asp little device turns out that that can't program the atmega 2560 which i think is the controller that's used on here that little device is just so junky that it can't work properly with this so i've gone ahead and ordered a new programmer which is confirmed to work on this so i can update the firmware i was about to talk about how good the documentation is in here and to be honest i thought i read most of it but it's 170 pages long and it actually talks about using the arduino as an isp so obviously i have an arduino uno lying around i could have used it instead of trying to get that silly usb asp working this is the programmer that i ended up ordering which is good because i wanted to actually have a good avr isp device so i wouldn't have any issues trying to load boot loaders next time okay the sip has passed so this is a good module excellent so i'm just going to draw a one and a tick mark on there so i know it's good that was probably 10 minutes from a time to test perspective and i'd have the march up and down tests disabled in this thing it would have taken longer if i had them in there if you've watched any other videos on this tester like on knolls retro lab you've probably heard people complain about the fact that finding stuff in the lists can be a little tedious and for the dram and stuff like that it's not so bad but for the logic chips there's a lot of them and it's probably going to be a little bit tedious so i think this menu here is for the lower number 74 lss and this one is for 500 plus anyhow let's go into the logic test okay so this is a 74 ls 163 so now we just have to scroll through now i can hold the button which is what i'm doing now and it's oh okay it went by pretty quick there let's see here okay it starts jumping i see the longer you hold it it jumps quite fast okay that's actually not bad there's like an acceleration going on okay here we go yeah it starts going by tens okay not bad that's actually better than i thought okay there it is 74 163 so let's stick that in close the tester and hit ok there we go it looks like it does about 15 tests and that's good so as you can see the date code this is from 1977. good old chip there but let's test this really old one the 74 156 from 1971 older than i am so we just hit no for now no more tests and we scroll down to what it is here two to four decoder oh that's amazing a working ttl chip from 1971. i'm just going to draw a tick mark on that and a tick mark on this so back to the menu if you push up or down it's pretty responsive but if i hold it you see it's going one at a time and now it's going 10 i don't know it's going really fast so there are like 500 chips in here maybe there's not 500 but you just hold it and okay you know this is actually a lot better than i thought maybe it accelerates a little too quickly no big deal you just let go and hold it again so not go too quickly all right so one of the things is also for this particular board there is no back button there's up and down okay and there's a reset button obviously reset will take us completely out resets the whole device on the newer versions of this board there's actually a fifth button that is like a back button or an escape key this one has provision to add that there's actually a pin right there next to this led and theoretically i could put a button here you just have to ground that and it's the equivalent of pushing back but there's actually another thing i can do i can just push these two buttons the up and down at the same time and it takes me to exit and i just hit okay and that backs out as well so it's an extra push you know it's the two buttons and then one to get out versus probably just pushing one button but i actually don't mind that at all that's a pretty creative use of this firmware and also what's cool is you notice these buttons are the tall versions you don't actually have to push them straight down you can actually tilt them over and that makes pushing two at the same time very easy you just use them like piano keys so that's pretty a cool little trick i didn't know that and actually talked about that in the documentation all right next test let's test some sram this is a two one four which is a color ram on a 64 and also video memory on the commodore pet very common and they seem to go bad quite a bit so we go into here and 2 1 4 there it is 1k times 4 bit hit test this should be pretty quick because there's not a lot of capacity to this chip there we go that is a good chip at least according to this tester excellent all of the chips we're testing here i have not tested before so this really is first time testing and that's why i'm marking these since i'm testing them we might as well see if they work next up we have some cache memory from like a 46 or something the 24 257 ak chip now because that's kind of a weird part number let's go to the database and look it up 24 257. hmm not found there all right i had to add the w so it's a win bond w4 257 this is actually a wind bond branded ship it's it's an sram 32x8 status supported select xx256 so let's look in here for that xx256 32k times eight bits there we go let's hit the button to start and now it's testing so i have to say this searchable database is extremely handy because like i would have never figured out that this particular chip is actually the xx256 profile if i was just looking through these menus for the test of this chip included in the documentation are actually the extensive and full lists of all the supported ics so if we open up the sram one when you look up a particular ic it tells you what profile you need to be using to do the testing some of them will say custom because yes you can actually load custom test parameters for roms sram and dram onto this not for logic right now but at least those other chips you put the profiles onto the sd card and when this thing powers up it'll actually load that into a custom menu on here so you can test it there are only a few slots for each type available but it's a super handy feature if you wanted to find custom chip types to test in here that maybe are rare and no one's ever heard of so this it as you can see has tested good so it gets a tick mark thank you very much my little pile of good chips is growing over here all right here's another sram chip to test i think this is the type that's in 1541 disk drives it's like 2k of sroun and there it is sram 2k by 8 and you use the profile xx16 and it can list all the various part numbers of compatible chips xx16 2k by one and hit ok it's going to test a lot more quickly than the one we were just doing a second ago so you can see it writing and reading and there we go tested good excellent these chips seem to be very reliable here's another sram this is a larger one i think this one is 32k it has the same pin out as a 27 256 eeprom if i recall it's the hm62256 alp-10 yep there it is the hitachi hm62 256 xx256 so let me show off a couple of the other interesting adapters that exist for this this one here allows you to dump atari 2600 cartridges although i can't demonstrate this because the cartridge actually won't fit over this you have to take it out of the case and then just stick the pcb directly into here so that chip passed so we'll put a tick mark on here excellent another good chip so let's take a look at another adapter that exists this one here is for dumping commodore 64 cartridges it has jumpers or actually normally you have a toggle switch but i didn't have the right one to install that allows you to dump the high and the low portion of the cartridge standard cartridge like this on the 64 either 8 or 16k there are some that are larger but they use some bank switching methods which is not compatible with reading with this adapter you're going to have to take the cartridge apart and remove the chips and actually read them directly on here let me just stick this on the cartridge and let's give this a try so i'll have to read this twice on both of these settings i'm pretty sure this is a 16k cartridge and we're going to use this setting right here now if i just push the ok button what's going to do is going to read the cartridge and it's just going to calculate a checksum but if i hold down the ok button for longer than just a quick push it'll actually save the contents onto the sd card there it goes and there it is saving the 2764. it will still calculate the actual checksum now one thing i'm noticing is that that checksum i don't think matched the first one let me just do another read out of this thing no that is not right okay so i guess this is not working very well for some reason with this cartridge because we keep getting a different crc now with reading the documentation apparently sometimes the old chips in these need more voltage than this thing is giving through all of this switching circuitry and in that case we could use something like this this adapter which plugs in and then has another zip socket has all of these jumpers which allow me to disconnect the vcc and the ground lines from this switching circuitry and just feed it directly off this header right here i did just notice though that i'm not going to be able to use this because unfortunately that zip socket is the smaller type and that will not go in there i think one of the problems is by the time the 5 volts from the dc to dc converter gets to these pins it's gone through transistors and there is voltage drop through transistors because they're being used as switches i think you're getting around 4.8 volts and that may not be enough for older chips like this cartridge the manual talks about these issues and that's why you have these decoupling adapters with this adapter what's neat is you can just remove these jumpers which disconnects the various pins on this zip socket to the one on the tester and then you can put little jumper leads around here to rewire the way it's actually talking to the ic in addition of course you can hook logic probes up to these various pins here so you can also look at the signaling while it's being tested as i mentioned earlier i built up this version 4 of the dc dc converter but there's actually a version three which i'm going to build up as well because one of the things that it can do that this one can't is it actually uses a configurable linear regulator that allows you to select which voltage it's going to output and i think it has jumper settings for like 5.1 volts and 5.2 volts even so that you can give this thing a little bit more voltage so that by the time it gets to the socket it will actually be at 5.0 volts so let me pop out this sd card to stick it in the computer we can take a look at what it did read off that eprom which we know is going to be no good this is the file right here load this into hxd and looking at the code you know it looks like there's something there but we know that it's not reading properly because the checksum keeps changing on the card you'll notice i have custom sram one and two here's the custom definition for this particular sram chip which is a 512k it's the same chip i used on my tandy 1000 ram expansion i guess this thing can test it so this defines what it is here uses all 32 pins of this socket and then all the various signals the manual describes very clearly exactly how to create your own files now speaking of rom chips this thing is already configured to read all sorts of custom mask roms like ones used on commodores you can't just stick these mask roms into a mini pro they are only really configured to read and write to eeproms or eeproms not these mask roms which have slightly different signaling especially when it comes to chip select lines this one is the moss 325 503-01 from 1983. i don't really know exactly what this is so we'll just stick it in there we're going to go over here to prom rom now one of the things is you kind of have to know with this mask rom how big it is so you could use the appropriate profile i'm going to say most likely this is going to be a 2364 so it's an 8k rom and there are two profiles to use a 24 and a 28 pin one i'm going to use the 24 pin that's what this is we're going to hit ok next is a sub menu asking about the selection logic for this ic this is saying with this profile which does say commodore when pin 20 goes low that activates the chip i can switch to the next one where it goes high it activates the chip doesn't say what that's for but maybe certain mask roms use that logic and then there's also jump to detect let's try that okay it detected it it says low 20. so of course this is a commodore chip so that makes sense we're going to hit ok and it's going to read this and calculate the checksum now there's the crc let's try reading it again let's just make sure it's the same should be i don't think there's any problem reading these yep that's the same now on my sd card which i took out because it was in the computer there's actually a little database that was included with this and it's like a checksum database so if we try this again it might read the card and maybe tell us what this is using index file there it is commodore 1540 disk drive and there's the rom 325 503-01-325-503-01 it worked and this chip is a good rom chip as well the database that i copied onto here is actually the entire maim database of everything that maim supports so if the rom is in maim and it's had its checksum calculated if i read it out on this thing it would tell us what that is how cool is that oh and let me demonstrate saving this on to the sd card so i push this and hold it and it's going to ask us about the state and there it is it's saving uh oh oh that's weird that eprom is empty what happened there let's try that again let's just read it quickly okay so when it has zeros it's empty so that's working maybe that's a bug i'm gonna hold this down there we go no it's working i think i just had a bad connection in there so there it created a bin file that's the name of the checksum it might have a text file as well let's just check it out so there's the bin file that's the dump of the rom and it created an associated text file and if we open this it's the text that was displayed on screen so that's very handy if you want to dump several chips and they are in the index that way you don't have to go writing down those check sums i happen to have another rom here has a tick mark on it this is from a c64 active state commodore commodore 64 ntsc that is so cool i'll put a tick mark on that all right here's another test how about a pla now this is a russian pla well it's a russian chip that was programmed to be a pla it's compatible with the old 82s 100 on this so we'll stick that in there i think the pla test is under logic because this is a logic chip there it is commodore pla uh 906 114 there's two in here and the 251 641 that's from maybe the c16 the commodore 16 and the plus four this is the one for the 64 though let's hit ok there we go so that chip tested good i mean i knew that of course because i just took it out of a working machine but very handy that this can quickly test your pla for you of course just putting a pla into a commodore 64 has that effect as well but if you happen to buy one and you want to make sure that it's good before you stick it in your computer we'll stick it in this thing all of these resistors and zener diodes protect the microcontroller on here from shorts if the chip is bad okay so i've tested a bunch of chips already and i've shown that this thing is really cool and really useful how about we try to read a chip that i've never been able to read before these here are intel 1702a eeproms the 1702 was one of the very first eproms ever released of course intel did create the eeprom and on the bottom these are from 1978 which is pretty far into their life i think they came out in 74. i don't even remember how big these are maybe they're like 512 bytes or something like that but the problem with these is that they require weird bias voltages specifically you need minus 9 volts well this tester can't normally produce the minus nine volts this thing needs so of course there's an adapter for that this is the adapter for the 1702 and what it has on it is a nine volt or negative nine volt linear regulator and you connect these leads directly to the dc-dc converter because it actually has a minus 12 volt output there and you hook it up to the ground right here on that header and then that powers up the minus 9 volts bias to the chip so you can actually fully test it so with the adapter connected but the wire's not connected to anything there's no power going to the ic right now so i can safely insert this and not worry about any kind of damage that might happen so with these 1702s i actually have several others i have no idea if they work i have no idea what's on them i mean they have these labels that just mean nothing to me so it'll be interesting to see what's on them we'll actually dump them all right so we're going to get the minus 12 volts and that should be going to the chip right now i'll just scroll through the various ones here it is requires an adapter 256 bytes okay so that's all this thing is we're going to hit okay okay read it out let's see if it reads it consistently okay checksum is exactly the same i'm going to hold this button to dump the contents so i need to look for the file 44d let's do this other chip quickly i just unplug the 12 volts and then take this chip out safely now remember because i've unplugged this cable here and the led is off there's no voltage going to this socket whatsoever so there's no risk me shorting out things with this chip remover i'm going to plug the minus 12 volts back in and we're going to test okay there's the checksum let's check it again okay it's the same and we're gonna dump it there it is it saved it this is so cool and here's our two files 2e8 and 44d there's no english words in this but there's certainly not a lot of room in here there most likely would have been a whole slew of these chips in whatever computer this was used on due to this tiny capacity it's interesting the contents of these two files is basically identical notice there's that byte and i think there was one other byte that was different i know there's like three or four bytes that are different so yeah that's interesting but that's one of the benefit of eproms over mask roms back in the day imagine if you were developing a computer and you were developing the software the os that ran on it you had to keep having mask roms manufactured so when e prompts came out even though you needed four of these for just one kilobyte it was still so much faster than having roms manufactured if you're trying to test in actual hardware now programming these is still a different matter it's difficult to get all sorts of weird programming voltages but it's possible you can do it with this let me check the documentation okay here it is to program eproms you need version 20 or higher of this device which of course i still have 19 on here so here's a picture of the adapter and actually looks like it has a little dc to dc power supply a little boost converter on here with a potentiometer so you can set the programming voltage you probably do it ahead of time using your multimeter to get it close to the correct programming voltage and then you can program these that is so cool so here's a picture of it programming the 2708 and currently i actually have some of these chips but i have no way to program them even my data io 2700 which i think is one of the most capable programmers around does not support the 2708 looks like the 2716 is also supported with firmware version 21. my mini pro is actually one of the old first generation devices the ones you can buy now are the second gen mark ii's this actually has higher programming voltages capabilities than the newer one and this can program 2716 it's not quite up to the task because this can only generate if i recall 21 volts and most of those chips need 25 but i have successfully programmed plenty of 2716s and they work fine my data io on the other hand can program 2716s without any issue but it is nice that this capability is here for people who have the newer mini pros who can't program 2716s and then there's also support for the old 2532 which i don't think i can actually program these on any of the devices i have although maybe my data io can program those looks like the adapter is for the 2716 and the 2532 together for both of these ics currently it seems this can only program those three types of e-prompts but maybe more are going to come in the future like potentially program these 1702s maybe with the help of external power supplies or more boost buck converters on the board for that i was lucky enough to get all these pcbs and the necessary parts to build up a bunch of other adapters but when i looked through these various adapters i didn't see any that i needed to build right now because i don't have any of these parts to even test with so i figured i'll just wait until i actually need to test one of these before i build up the adapter so what are my thoughts overall with the retro chip tester pro i kind of love it minor gripes aside for like the user interface and the speed of some of the ram tests i think it's a pretty great device it's staggering how many devices it can test that database seems to be growing in leaps and bounds i looked up some of the parts that i want to test from the trcd model 2 especially the bus transceivers in there they're an obscure old part that's really not used in very much especially these days but of course this thing fully supports testing those the mini pro supports testing some logic devices and the only reason why it doesn't have a bigger database is simply a software issue i'm pretty sure this mini pro hardware is probably similarly capable as this thing is to testing stuff but the software is just not well developed so there's just no way to test so many chips with this thing i'd say my biggest feature request for this and i don't think it would be possible without a revision of this board would be serial control of the tester it would be really handy to be able to quickly jump to different tests using a serial port connection than having to navigate through the menu imagine you have like 50 different logic chips you want to test quickly you have to scroll through all these menus to get to them it's not exactly ideal but i think if this thing had a functional serial port you just plug it into your pc and you type in what you're looking for and then initiate the test from the computer or maybe with a button push on here it would just speed up that process so dramatically but like i said those are minor complaints and this is still a very cool device the build process of this was also excellent as i pointed out during the time lapse very easy to follow documentation very well designed pcb with very clear markings on everything so i really didn't struggle putting this thing together whatsoever as long as you stay totally organized and have all your parts ready to go so with that that sums up my thoughts on the retro chip tester pro i'm really happy to have this thing it's very exciting i can't wait to use it some more for testing and troubleshooting on machines and i really want to thank the viewer who sent it in especially that incredible organization of all those parts if you want to buy one for yourself i'll put a link in the description below this is not a sponsored video or anything like that so these are really my thoughts on this device so if you like this video or found it interesting anyway i'd definitely appreciate a thumbs up check out the second channel if you haven't already thanks to my patrons their names are scrolling up the side of the screen i really really appreciate all the support they've given me and i guess that's going to be it so stay healthy stay safe we'll see you next time bye [Music]

Channel: Adrian's Digital Basement

Views: 62,509

Rating: 4.9631963 out of 5

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Id: n46oM3jXmtU

Length: 41min 55sec (2515 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 04 2021