CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

Alan Head · Joined: 07 Aug 2006 Posts: 38

Plea for Help,

It's about 8 years since I replaced the Dallas Chip in my YA Board.

In this time my PC has been upgraded several times so I am not sure the exact hardware configuration I had 8 years ago.

I decided it was time to make a backup of the chip "Just in Case".

I found one of my old PC's with a parallel port and set it up with the Willem Programmer and software as before. Its Running Win XP media center edition. It has a dual core Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ processor.

I made a copy of my current Dallas chip and saved it.

I thought I would try to write it to my original Dallas Chip to ensure everything was OK.

This where things get strange. I am able to write the data to the old chip but it fails at 12% when verifying.

I took the Dallas chip from my spares machine and copied it as well.

The Data from my spares machine writes perfectly to my old chip and verifies 100%.

I then tried to write my old data from 2008 when I last changed the Dallas chip.

Now this data appears to write but fails verification immediately. Reading the Dallas chip now contains garbage.

I write all zeros everything works fine. I write all "FF" everything works fine. I write my spare machine Dallas data chip, writes perfectly. I write my recent Dallas Data verification fails at 12%. I write my 2008 Dallas Data and verification fails at 0%. Write my spares machine Dallas chip, all works fine again.

I am going around in circles.

I have changed parallel port address, I have forced the software to run on a single core. Still no change

The only conclusion I can reach is that I cannot trust my programmer.

Anyone experienced similar issues?

thanks

Alan

CIR Engineering · Posted: Sun Nov 22, 2015 6:35 pm Post subject:

Alan, what's the power supply for your programmer? That might be the issue.

craigr

Alan Head · Joined: 07 Aug 2006 Posts: 38

Craig,

I thought that might be the issue as well.

It is powered via USB. I have tried different USB ports and also an iPhone charger and an iPad charger.

I even tried it in a VMware virtual machine running windows Xp pro. This made it take a lot longer to read and write but the results were exactly the same. I also reconfigured the board and used different software. Exactly the same results.

I am beginning to wonder if it's something to do with the parallel port on my PC motherboard. I'm assuming it's perfectly capable of reading accurately and only has a write issue. I'll try to find an old machine at work and give it a go next weekend.

It defies logic, I could understand if it wrote nothing successfully. However as long as the image was read on this PC it will happily write it.

Alan

Alan Head · Joined: 07 Aug 2006 Posts: 38

Problem Solved !

I gave in and purchased a MiniPRO USB programmer.
Reads writes and verifies all my old images.

I guess the printer port on my old pc was not sending a reliable voltage when writing.

I have heard of others adding pull up resistors to get these parallel port programmers working.

I now have a programmer that programs extremely quickly and works in Windows 8.

Alan