While doing a random, late night ebay search (they're the best really), I found this:
Your eyes are not deceiving you. There is a 34-pin Floppy port (pretty standard), a 40-pin IDE port, 15-pin "Game" port, 9-pin Serial port, and physical DB25 Parallel and DB9 Serial ports are on the bracket itself. All pretty standard, though a bit unusual to have Odd/Even EPROMs. Where things get interesting, though, is a third EPROM, the Winbond 8-bit controller, and that little teeny tiny "Artop" chip. It's a full SCSI-2 controller made by ACARD (just before they became ACARD).
Yes, that's right, it's a 32-bit VLB Super DUPER I/O card. Finding data on this beast has been quite the exercise, with finding drivers for DOS, Netware, OS/2, Win95, and Win NT thanks to a post made 22 years ago on an obscure Russian forum (scanned/verified clean with several antivirus tools)
My issue is that the NM27C256Q chips do not seem to want to read in my TI-866 equivalent reader. I tried using a WinBond W27E257 model in the reader software, but the same error appears when I attempt to read any of the three chips. The software says Pins 2, 3, 7, 8, 12, 13, and 21-28 are in the wrong position. Obviously, I want to document the hell out of this thing and get it on TheRetroWeb. I have no idea if I'll ever get my hands on another one of these odd balls, but without the EPROM data, efforts to fully archive it are stymied.
So, any suggestions on alternative DIP28 EPROM chip models to try?
Let this be a lesson, sometimes it pays to update your software. Sadly, meant I had to move the programmer back to Windows but, one firmware update later and the EPROMs are reading just fine. Backup time!
Your eyes are not deceiving you. There is a 34-pin Floppy port (pretty standard), a 40-pin IDE port, 15-pin "Game" port, 9-pin Serial port, and physical DB25 Parallel and DB9 Serial ports are on the bracket itself. All pretty standard, though a bit unusual to have Odd/Even EPROMs. Where things get interesting, though, is a third EPROM, the Winbond 8-bit controller, and that little teeny tiny "Artop" chip. It's a full SCSI-2 controller made by ACARD (just before they became ACARD).
Yes, that's right, it's a 32-bit VLB Super DUPER I/O card. Finding data on this beast has been quite the exercise, with finding drivers for DOS, Netware, OS/2, Win95, and Win NT thanks to a post made 22 years ago on an obscure Russian forum (scanned/verified clean with several antivirus tools)
My issue is that the NM27C256Q chips do not seem to want to read in my TI-866 equivalent reader. I tried using a WinBond W27E257 model in the reader software, but the same error appears when I attempt to read any of the three chips. The software says Pins 2, 3, 7, 8, 12, 13, and 21-28 are in the wrong position. Obviously, I want to document the hell out of this thing and get it on TheRetroWeb. I have no idea if I'll ever get my hands on another one of these odd balls, but without the EPROM data, efforts to fully archive it are stymied.
Let this be a lesson, sometimes it pays to update your software. Sadly, meant I had to move the programmer back to Windows but, one firmware update later and the EPROMs are reading just fine. Backup time!
Last edited: