jt, I've been down this road already....
I have an old Needham EMP-30 chip programmer with parallel port and software which will run on, at the latest, Win XP -- maybe Win 7, XP mode.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/NE-Needham-Electornics-EMP-30-Device-Programmer-Flash-ROM-Writer-with-Module-/400530945439?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item5d4181359f
Did you ever buy one of those Dell D430s?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/LOT-OF-10-DELL-LATITUDE-D430-LAPTOP-CORE-2-DUO-1-33GHz-2GB-WIRELESS-/221312861917?pt=Laptops_Nov05&hash=item33874646dd
They have a docking station available:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/350664716706?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1423.l2649
which includes a parallel port.
It works great with my old programmer. Probably works fine with others. And for a bonus, OSX can be nicely hacked onto this model of laptop.
That way you can have a nice compact laptop to drive your chip programmer, which doesn't take up much space and when it's not booted into Windows, it's about like a Macbook Air 13".
My chip programmer is the whole reason I bought a Dell Latitude D430 in the first place.
The only bad thing about it is the 1.8" ZIF IDE hard drive. If you buy one without a drive, have the hard drive solution figured out first. The 240GB Toshiba MK2431 has pretty well dried up. It got down to about $70 and then seems to have been discontinued. Sigh. Now it's up around $250. It's cheaper to get a 1.8" IDE to MSATA adapter and a 240 GB MSATA SSD now. Much better performance too, I imagine, but putting $200 into these old laptops seems kind of silly.
Incidentally, the parallel port on the docking station for the Latitude E4300 will also work, but the E4300 doesn't take OSX, so it is purely a Windows machine if you go that route. Almost twice as fast in the CPU though.
I think all those images will expire in 6 months. Is there a way to capture them to the forum space?
I have an old Needham EMP-30 chip programmer with parallel port and software which will run on, at the latest, Win XP -- maybe Win 7, XP mode.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/NE-Needham-Electornics-EMP-30-Device-Programmer-Flash-ROM-Writer-with-Module-/400530945439?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item5d4181359f
Did you ever buy one of those Dell D430s?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/LOT-OF-10-DELL-LATITUDE-D430-LAPTOP-CORE-2-DUO-1-33GHz-2GB-WIRELESS-/221312861917?pt=Laptops_Nov05&hash=item33874646dd
They have a docking station available:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/350664716706?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1423.l2649
which includes a parallel port.
It works great with my old programmer. Probably works fine with others. And for a bonus, OSX can be nicely hacked onto this model of laptop.
That way you can have a nice compact laptop to drive your chip programmer, which doesn't take up much space and when it's not booted into Windows, it's about like a Macbook Air 13".
My chip programmer is the whole reason I bought a Dell Latitude D430 in the first place.
The only bad thing about it is the 1.8" ZIF IDE hard drive. If you buy one without a drive, have the hard drive solution figured out first. The 240GB Toshiba MK2431 has pretty well dried up. It got down to about $70 and then seems to have been discontinued. Sigh. Now it's up around $250. It's cheaper to get a 1.8" IDE to MSATA adapter and a 240 GB MSATA SSD now. Much better performance too, I imagine, but putting $200 into these old laptops seems kind of silly.
Incidentally, the parallel port on the docking station for the Latitude E4300 will also work, but the E4300 doesn't take OSX, so it is purely a Windows machine if you go that route. Almost twice as fast in the CPU though.
I think all those images will expire in 6 months. Is there a way to capture them to the forum space?