January 11, 2019

The MOD_EMUP eprom burner - ISA card

What follows is a "gallery" showing various cards that claim to be one form or other of the SAC-201. There is apparently a 201 and a 201A and claims have been made that you need one card or the other with various programmers. None of this has been resolved to my satisfaction. The biggest question in my opinion is whether the card in question supports wait states and is jumpered to work in the ISA bus it has been plugged into. The signals to the 25 pin cable seem to be standardized.

We have found one image of a SAC-101 card with a 37 pin cable connector that clearly won't work with the 25 pin cable on any of the units I have encountered. I actually have no clue what it would work with.

Various ISA cards in review

I ran across this photo of another interface card for the MOD-EMUP. The claim is that this is a SAC-201, but I think that claim is wrong. This looks like an older and simpler card. Note that there is no PAL and in particular, no switch (or counter chip) for wait states. The astute observer will notice that there is no connection to the ISA card signal for IO-CH-RDY, so no wait states can be generated. The claim is that this is for the MOD-EMUP-A and is a SAC-201B (which is identical in function to a SAC-201CE), and that it will not replace a SAC-201A card. I will have to take great care when I get my MOD-EMUP-A unit to be sure the card below will work with it.

Here is my card, which is clearly labeled SAC-201.

And here is another one! This one called an SAC-201B. This was apparently manufactured after the fact by someone wanting to keep these old units alive.

The seller (betgv) was offering the card with these comments: For sale is a brand new card, I have 2 eprom burners I got without the cards, so Thanks to Matthieu Benoit, I found this project, and could build a card for my programmers, to be cost effective I had to build minimum 10 cards, I split some costs with 2 more friends, who need same cards for their programmers too, and ended up with 5 more, I'm posting here. Those are brand new cards I've built by myself, they are becoming very rare to find ! Each card as been individually tested with both of my Programmers (Hi-LO ALL-03 and EPP-04 AE) The SAC-201B and SAC-201CE cards are identical in function. This card may not replace an SAC-201A card, depending on how you talk to.


Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Electronics pages / tom@mmto.org