I recently bought a TL866A from ebay with a bunch of adapters for a little under $100 shipped. Seems like a decent programmer except for the fact that it doesn’t support the 27C200/27C400 mask ROMs that hold Kickstart. Some alternatives floating around seemed to indicate that the 27C240 was pretty close, but the pinout was different.

I created an adapter to convert the pinouts.

The parts I used were:

• A wire-wrap tool because I never owned one, never did wire wrap. (amazon linked)
• Matching 30-gauge wire or similar (amazon linked)
• Standard perf board from Radio Shack
• 40-pin Wire Wrap sockets from SparkFun

While I love Emulation Technology’s stuff, their shit is never in-stock and it’s always so damn expensive. They make a $93 adapter for just this purpose, and thankfully provide the pinout. I downloaded the datasheets for the two ROM chips, and came up with exactly what they did, so I used theirs as the source for the pinout.(PDF linked datasheet)

Here’s the finished result. Sorry about the wonky colors. Damn cellphones cameras are too convenient! Lots of patience was required to wire-wrap this. (80) connections is no joke!

In Minipro, the TL866A programmer software, I selected “INTEL 27C240″ and this seemed to work, although “Check ID” feature didn’t work, because the chip is identifying itself as something different.

I still want to compare my read with some other files, and check that it worked 100%, but the initial results look fine to me!

A couple things to note:

• I’m not focusing on whether I can BURN 27C200/400’s yet, I just wanted to read them. I’d THINK this would work, but this would need verified before I’d try it.
• There is a reverse problem that would require a different solution, and that is using newer/alternative roms IN THE AMIGA ROM SOCKET. Remember, this adapts the amiga rom chip to be readable in the programmer. Nothing more!!