So, I spent a ton of money recently on trying to figure out how to burn roms for my Amiga 4000. Everyone recommends you buy and use a TL866II+ which will, if you look for one, probably drive you to the new T48 Xgecu programmer.

The problem is the new T48 (and the older TL866) do not have direct support for the 40-pin DIP AMD AM27C400 EPROMs that the Amiga 4000 uses.

So, in my stupidity I started looking for … alternatives. I found places selling these FlashROM devices which are probably really awesome if you can get them to work - after trying to get all the adapters etc to work, I kinda gave up. I have a sneaking suspicion that the reason is because my TSOP48 adapter that the Retro Rewind adapter plugs into is bust, out of the box. See, the problem is, there’s all these fakes out there and just shoddy versions, that you buy them and you try them and they don’t work, not because you’re doing anything wrong, but because they’re broken.

So its very frustrating.

I am probably going to keep trying to get those FlashROMs to work but the real practical solution right now is still to use EPROMs. You can find the AM27C400’s on fleabay for about $7-$8 each, or less if you buy 5 or 10 at a time. Personally I just want them so that I can have custom roms, or if I buy an update to AmigaOS, I don’t have to pay extra for the roms as I get those when you buy that software.

But, you might ask, how do I get the EPROMs to work? Simple!

DO NOT BUY THE T48. There’s a ton of dodgy clones on Amazon for $80, but the real legit T48 costs about $90. And then you’ll be buying a bunch of adapters, which you will have no way of knowing if they will work or not for more… OR you can just buy the T56. Which is about $200 but you will be able to plug the chip straight in and read/write to it without any fuss.

Annoyingly ALL of the instructions out there talk about getting this stuff working with the TL866II which IS OBSOLETE now on the Xgecu site and they tell anyone who goes to their site that any of those white ones you see are all fakes. There’s no stock anymore. Which leaves legit T48’s which if you want to burn kickstarts with need an adapter.

Yikes.

So yeah, I bought myself a UV thingy for $30, a bunch of AM27C400s, and am calling it a day.