EmuROM - An Open Hardware ROM emulator

Back in the nineties I spent a couple of years doing embedded system design, plus developing ISA and EISA cards. We had some cool tools for working on embedded machines, one of which was a ROM emulator. It was a plastic box with a ribbon cable hanging out one end, and a PC parallel port on the other. You could remove the ROM from a target system and plug it in, and load the ROM image into RAM inside the device under control of your PC. It made messing about with ROMs really straightforward.

Anyway, I'm messing about with ROMs now, and find the whole remove-erase-program-reinsert thing tedious, especially when my EPROM programmer only works on my old XP machine, which due to it's fragility isn't networked, which in turn means all my code has to be stuck on a USB stick to transfer to the programmer.

So I went looking online for ROM emulators. I found almost the perfect device, by John Tsiombikas. A straightforward board with a little Atmel microcontroller loading a RAM chip with data, which in turn is gated to the host machine using some tri-state buffers. Even better, John has released the whole lot under a Free Hardware and Free Software licence, allowing anyone to take his design work and play with it as they wish, as long as they in turn release their work under the same licence. And it's in KiCad!

Works for me! I took John's board and started by dropping support for 24 pin ROMs. If I ever need to emulate 2732's etc, I can aways do another board. As it's so tiny and I wanted to ensure good signal integrity on the host machine, I did away with the ribbon cable and mounted it via a 90 degree header and adapter board directly to the machine. I did a little work on the layout to reduce the size of the thing and neaten it up, including hiding the host tri-states under the RAM, which is socketed.

In any case, all the design files are on my google drive. I haven't yet updated the software, but am envisaging extending the firmware a bit so that no software is needed on the controlling PC aside from a simple terminal program, with EPROM code downloaded via X-modem, and perhaps even a simple monitor program. I do most of my work on a Mac, and like to use existing software (like serial-ii) as much as possible.

Here are the files.

Metcal MX500P soldering iron repair

I've been giving my soldering iron something of a flogging of late. It's a Metcal MX500P, one of the very finest irons ever to be made. It uses 13.56MHz RF to heat a teensy inductor right in the tip, with an incredibly ingenious temperature regulation system whereby a magnet in the tip, once it gets to temperature, hits it's Curie point and loses magnetism, changing the frequency the coil resonates at and thus making it get more or less hot with the applied 13.56 MHz. In any case, yesterday it simply stopped getting hot. I found an extremely good on-line analysis of the soldering iron here., and mention of dead driver transistors. in forums.

In any case, I opened it up and had a look, and there was a pretty obvious popped capacitor:

It's C4, a 330n 63V film cap that just does smoothing on a DC rail. Here it is after removal:

I replaced it with a 330n 100V one, and voila.

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