Pygmy EPROM programmer for Sharp PC-1270

[Dave Britten]

I've recently come into possession of this thing, and I'm wondering if anybody out there has any info on how to use it. It connects via RS-232 (not surprisingly), and I've got a sack full of EPROM cards of various sizes. I know these were hugely popular with the PC-1270, but I'm wondering if they might be of any use with the PC-1360 or PC-E500, which take the same RAM cards. Maybe I can flash some of the old auto financing programs like I see bundled with PC-1270s on ebay all the time?

[robve]

(01-27-2022 04:27 PM)Dave Britten Wrote:  I've recently come into possession of this thing, and I'm wondering if anybody out there has any info on how to use it.

Love to know if someone has more information on this. All I know is that PROM software has a page on PC-1270 programming with flash cards, which I assume would have to contain the same program format as the EPROMs.

- Rob

[rprosperi]

The format on the cards is the same, but P*ROM and Pygmy's devtools were quite different and unlikely to be easily found these days. The "SDK" in both cases included a 'compiler', some memory adjusting tools and other tools for loading both RAM and EPROM cards, using programmers like this one.

The 'compilers' were really tokenizers, as the 1270 (and similar series) could only run the tokenized BASIC programs, nominally created on machines like the 1251, 1247, etc. They could not run any binary code. But there were also some tricks they learned about the tokenized byte sequences that let them tweak things to speed up programs, reduce file size, etc. all analogous to the same things done with the 75C/D and 71B.