Willem programmer questions!!!

[amigaksi]

The Willem programmer worked okay under Windows '98/XP for burning EPROMs like 27256/27512, EEPROMs like 28c256 and FLASH chips like 29C011.  The one I have uses the parallel port for communicating and USB port for just the power.  It should work faster on machines with faster parallel ports and older Windows that do not check much for I/O port protection.  Also, for some chips, it gives you a warning to shut-off the power-management and/or cpu cooling since the power management slows down the parallel port and could throw off the timing.

I benchmarked the parallel port using my floppy simulator and on a toshiba 460CDT, it runs at about 1 megabytes/second under Windows '98SE with no power management and about 600KB/second when power management or other tasks are interfering.

[amigaksi]

>I use the willem I got from sivava. I burn 27c400s, 27c256s all the time and a few 27c800s now and then and it hasn't given any single problem to me yet, aside from some burning issues which I relate to dead\dying roms. Keep in mind that you also need the 16bit eprom adapter (to burn 40/42 pin roms like 27c400/27c800). I use an old laptop with win98se to burn the roms (my 'new' pc don't even have parallel and serial ports ... aargh).

I just got a good deal on the 27C512 which you can also use in place of 27C256, 27C128, 27C64 if you just duplicate the code and make the higher address bits don't care:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260206588585

The deal is still going on as someone seems to be liquidating their stock.  He also has the 1Meg flash chips which are pin-compatible with EPROMs:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260207604823

You may need to get a desktop if you want to use the latest machine with a parallel Willem programmer.  Even if the desktop doesn't contain a parallel port, at least you can put in a PCI parallel port card in there.  

What's worse, they don't have floppy drives anymore either on desktops so you can't even install a SATA HD driver which Windows XP demands be on a floppy disk during installation.
So upgrade to Vista but then you would have to throw away the desktop and get one with 2GB RAM or something similar, pay for the upgrade (hardware and software), and buy newer versions of all of your software as people may look at your older MS Office, or other software as "obsolete".