Austin, TX
As reported in the
Monster_Bash club; I had a lot of trouble getting my old sckool Needham's EMP-30 parallel port programmer to function properly with a 8Mbit EEPROM - specifically the M27C801. Not really surprising; given how old the programmer is. It also doesn't do M27C16 eproms well either.
So; I went on FleaBay and bought myself a newer USB programmer. I could have bought one of the cheap china knock offs; but I just wanted something I could trust to do the job. My day job usually specs Xeltek programmers for doing things like eMMC and SPI chips so I thought I'd give one of their older programmers a try. There was a SuperPro 280U that had no bidders and there was a clear note hand-written on the pictures that said the programmer would only work on Windows XP. 
SuperPro 280U I decided it was worth the risk because it was modern-ish and I already had a WinXP machine running under VMWare. I use that VM to run my Epilog Laser cutter which only has WinXP 32bit drivers.
I received the programmer yesterday; and verified it indeed worked with my old Dell WinXP laptop which I used to run the EMP-30. After dinner I decided to do a little bit of research to see if I could force the old USB drivers to function under Windows 10 using my
EE workbench's 64bit PC. I was starting to look at the impossible of task of getting the existing drivers to install by disabling Driver Enforcement ... but that was not successful because the underlying task of having to re-develop the driver under a 64bit os is impractical without having the actual source code of the 32bit driver.
Some more google searches came across a now unavailable Website: macros-arcade.com where they talk about some smart guys figuring out the USB chip in the programmer was actually a Cypress EzUSB chip. I found a Google Cache of that webpage to read up on the process. Luckily that chip driver has a 64bit component.
The end result is that I was able to get the programmer to function under Windows 10 64bit fairly painlessly using that webcache and a polish website whom had the files. I documented the whole process on my blog incase someone else has the same series of programmers and wants to do the same. But really; I just wanted it documented incase I need to reproduce this on another system.
Here's direct link to my blog post:
