HP Portable Plus - ROMBO 128 KB EPROMS?

[Brian Hudson]

I own a ROMBO EPROM programmer from Personalized Software. I have the manual and some custom 128KB EPROM modules, but I lost the software. I contacted Hal Goldstein, but he was unable to find a copy in his archives. I bought a generic USB programmer that I will use to duplicate some 27C512 (64KB) EPROMs. I will also try to duplicate some 128KB ROMs onto the custom 128KB EPROMS. 27C1024 (128KB) EPROMS are 32-pin packages, so the Personalized Software custom EPROM module mounts a 32-pin PLCC package on a PCB adapter to 28 pins. To program on the ROMBO, two jumpers are removed from the module, and a 5-pin cable connects the jumper pins to a personality module on the ROMBO. This allows ROMBO to select the upper and lower 64KB blocks during programming.

Portable Plus reads software drawer ROMs as 16-bits wide, whether the ROMs are singles or pairs. Singles are programmed byte sequential, but pairs are programmed even bytes in first ROM and odd bytes in second ROM. ROMBO software included an interleaving utility for user-generated DOS source files.

I have sharp photo of the 128KB modules.