When I got my vintage Vector MZ up and running, I went with a drop-in compatible EEPROM instead of a UV EPROM. It takes a few seconds to rewrite. Some folks even go as far as a ZIF socket to make this even easier. At $3/chip or something it's a pretty reasonable solution, although the "English" in the programmer software is kind of annoying.
For my future new build S-100 system, on the Z80 side the new 4K/4K monitor code in the V2 Z80 CPU board supports sending a program over directly via Zmodem.... I have a custom monitor image for my MZ that allows this as well and it's a pretty fast way to get things loaded into RAM.
Your board sounds interesting - when you say flash memory, do you mean like a simple file on an SD card? Which then gets loaded into the RAM on startup? That might be neat for troubleshooting, to be able to put a .hex file on an SD card and have the individual S-100 board itself wait the CPU and load the .hex into the RAM on its own, then jump to the program that was just loaded.....
Andrew
On Monday, March 3, 2014 8:17:32 PM UTC-8, Ants Pants wrote:
Hi Guys,
for me one of the most frustrating things in the early days was waiting for UVEPROM's to erase so i could write the new or modified piece of code onto it to be tested in a system. when bug testing this can be fairly time consuming unless you have a substantial number of UVEPROM to keep circulating through the UV Eraser. i know some people write a new piece of code back into memory via a monitor and RS232, some people write and compile to a COM files for use with CP/M etc. i bring up this topic because for me i dont really use monitor programs and really just write a piece of code todo something specific. so after my last system "melt down" i chose to stry solve this issue for the future, which lead me to develop a bit of a frankenstein board that uses flash memory, cpld's, 7400 series, SRAM & a UVEPROM with a "bios" to load whatever "new piece of code" into a specific memory range on startup, whatever that code my be, a buggy monitor, a new routine, cp/m, application specific routine, load machine code for a bus master to take over etc.. im just curius to know what are other people are using these days to save development time and frustration?
Regards,
Ants