Reading Amiga Kickstart ROMs with a TL866A reader

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). Local Pinout if their link goes down.

Here’s the finished result. 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!!

Update: I verified my ROM read 100% correct by comparing the CRC32 checksum to one on the Cloanto ROMS page found here.