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Perrier Serial Eprom Programmer

I borrowed this unit from Roger Sanderson (department of Electrical and Computer Engineering) here at University of Waterloo in order to do some personal hobby work with retro Commodore hardware. It is a nice unit, made by a UW grad named Wayne Perrier. It may be old by todays standards (20 years old) and with only serial communications, but it is very solid and supports up to 512kB (27512) eproms. Some versions of the programmer had only 32Kb of RAM which limited the size of the eproms you could work with but I've never seen any of those.

It is copyrighted in 1989 by Perrier Technologies (v1.0) , likely a company he set up the year he designed it while still in university. It handles eproms from 2716 (2Kb) to 27512 (64Kb). The serial port is auto-detecting and runs from 1200 to 19200 baud, N-8-1.

 

Programmer Downloads

Firmware v1.02: The only old firmware version I have.

Firmware v2.00: This is the newest firmware version I have. It has three new commands from v1.02 and some changes to some other commands, extra supported EPROM's and a changed HELP menu.

Updated user manual (Dec 21, 2010) in PDF: The only version of the manual I had was v1.00, an original cerlox-bound version. Since I had the v2.00 firmware, I compared both command sets and noted the difference. Then I scanned, OCR'd and updated the manual to encompass all the changes it needed. I have the updated version in Microsoft Word 2007 DOCX format.

 

Pictures of the programmer

Top

Top of the programmer.

The SOCKET ACTIVE light only comes on when there is activity on the eprom in the socket. Otherwise it is safe to insert/remove eproms in the socket. I added the small GND symbol to the left of the ZIF socket so I always know where to put the ground pin of smaller (24-pin) eproms.

Bottom

The bottom of the programmer.

This one is serial number 3. I also have acquired serial number 4. Apparently only a handful of units were made with most being purchased by the university.

Rear The rear of the programmer.
Power supply The power supply of the programmer.
Bottom side of logic board The bottom side of the logic board.
Component side of logic board

The component side of the logic board.

It has 64Kb of RAM (the KM62256ALP chips) which supports up to 512kb eproms and is run by a 8031 CPU. This unit came with v2.00 firmware which is the latest I've seen.

The firmware eprom is the white-stickered chip at the top of the picture. Getting at it to upgrade the eprom (for a newer firmware version) requires a complete disassembly of the unit.

Page created by Peter Schepers, IST


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