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.