I have dumped a fair amount of arcade ROMs for preservation purposes (a few notable examples being alternative revisions of Batsugun and Dogyuun, as well as several Namco System 10 games), and currently my preferred programmer is a Elnec BeeProg 2C.
This is a nice device, with a big drawback. It’s expensive and the adapters for it are proprietary and very expensive. A single adapter can cost over 200eur and will only be useful for a certain type of IC’s, and this doesn’t just mean the packages type. As an example, TSOP48 NOR and NAND flash will require different adapters.
Getting one of these if you only want to dump a few ROMs probably won’t make much sense, but if you are an advanced hobbyist, I think throwing money at this problem is well worth it.
So why get this instead of something cheaper?
Simply put, after using different types of cheap Chinese universal programmers I got annoyed enough that I felt the need to upgrade to something that:
- Has support for (essentially) all type of chips I’ll want to dump.
- Produces reliable dumps that I feel like I can trust.
- Writes ROMs reliably with high success rate.
- Support writing old CPLD’s with proper vendor algorithms.
- Feels like a professional device. Has a known manufacturer with non-suspicious software.
Elnec Beeprog2 checks all these boxes. It’s expensive, but KNOWING that it will produce reliable results is worth the extra spend to me.
… So, what’s so bad about the cheap ones?
Quite a few things really, lets try to break it down into a few sections.
The software
Getting software for the cheap universal programmers means dealing with one of the following:
- Needs to be fetched from random electronics forums, because there’s no homepage for the maker of them or any official means to get the software. Sometimes they ship with this software on a CD. Sometimes they won’t.
- Can be downloaded from an official webpage that look sketchy as fuck. Hell, TL866II/Xgecu is very popular and their official support is some random QQ email and the software is hosted on mediafire.
It’s not a bad idea to have a separate PC just to use these types of software, cause I have zero faith that they won’t include malware…
… especially since I experienced that myself when I bought a RT809H (don’t ever do this). The software for this device is full of viruses. This is true both for the included CD and from the official website.
Additionally, the UI for the software itself usually looks sort of sketchy, although I will admit the TL866/XGecu software is not too bad, if ignoring the poor translation from Chinese.
Reliability
I’ve had experiences with both incorrect reads and failed writes at a higher rate on the cheaper devices, especially TOP3000. While this can be mostly sidestepped for dumping by reading a ROM several times and making sure that checksums are consistent, it’s not a good feeling.
Failures on burning EPROMs were not uncommon for me with these devices either.
Some devices such as TL866II require manual splitting of larger DIP ROMs, which introduces points of potential failures.
I don’t have high hopes that these devices properly implement the algorithms and settings of more unusual devices, but usually they will kindof work.
Device support
Dumping common ROMs will usually work, but when having to read or write more obscure parts, the cheaper programmers just won’t work at all. For roms this can mean things like TL866II not supporting larger Flash ICs, but I’ve also hit this several times when having to dump devices with internal roms. One recent example is MX10EXA internal rom on “Crazy Bugs”.
Another example is writing to CPLD’s. For some research I was doing on Cave CV1000 hardware, I had to write to a EPM7032 CPLD which as far as I could tell, none of the cheaper programmers supported.
If you are going to dump and/or build stuff as a hobby, you will keep running into issues like this basically. It is not great.
Ok… but is it a Beeprog worth it though?
I mean… if you have sufficient disposable income to motivate buying one without significantly impacting your personal economy, and want to make sure you have a reliable device that always works then yeah, definitely!
If you just want to burn/dump a few common types of ROMs then probably not.
It’s the same as any other tool really. If you just wanna do some simple cuts of plywood, you don’t need a Festool TS 55 track saw… but if you are going to use it a lot, you are unlikely to regret getting it. For now I’m just renting a TS 55 when I need one, but there is no such option for a Beeprog…
So anyways yeah, I recommend it.