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From: Dick@cup.portal.com (dick a wotiz)
Newsgroups: sci.electronics
Subject: Re: JDR Microdevices Programmer
Message-ID: <28731@cup.portal.com>
Date: 8 Apr 90 23:38:22 GMT
References: <19387@boulder.Colorado.EDU> <1104@mgse.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 22

> > I am about to pick up the phone and order the universal programmer
> > from JDR, priced at $500. It does PAL's, EPROM's, etc. and also tests
> > some IC's. The price seems right, even though other machines might
> > handle more chips. Please email at once and stop me if you have had
> > bad experience with the unit. 

I've been using one in an XT for a couple of years now.  It seems to be
reasonably built, and so far it works with all of the common EPROMS and
PALS that I've used with it.

> 
> It seems like a nice unit, I have it in a PC/AT and when I run Xenix,
> Xenix turns it on somehow. The first time I found out about this, it
> had been on all nite and was quite hot.

I also noticed mine getting warm after a while.  It appears that on power-up,
the hardware comes up in some uninitialized random state.  I found that
by running the IOCHK program that comes with the unit whenever I boot
the machine, it initializes it properly, and it no longer gets warm.

Dick Wotiz                          dick@portal.com
                            {sun|uunet}!portal!dick