And then… Cartridges.

Continuing the Colecovision fun…

I had a dead Gorf cartridge that appears to have a bad ROM.  All the traces check out.  So, to replace the guts of the cart, I ordered some boards (https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/COLECOCART.html) from PCBway, and bought the co-requisite PROMs and LS chips via AliExpress.  I was able to get enough to make 10 carts for about $20 (minus the shells).

To program the PROMs, I used a TL866IIplus programmer.  There’s no official software for Linux, but there’s a nice command line utility called minipro that can be used to write the PROMs. 

Then, I got to playing around and created a minimal Linux GUI/editor PROM reader/flasher in C++ that I used to edit the copyright message in the above screenshot.

The Qt GUI sits on top of a C++ (no Qt dependencies) library I created (libmpup) that wraps the minipro  C code – leveraging the lower level routines therein so that I didn’t have to re-create the wheel and that it could potentially support other types of programmers added to minipro in the future.  If I can find the will to polish the rough edges and get the code into a presentable state, I will post it on my GitHub.

The libmpup library could potentially be reused by other projects to create GUIs for GTK or other platforms.