First off I don't want to pick any fights. If your in the market for a burner please do yourself a favor and buy a Moates, there's not even that big a price difference. Trust me the TOP is a pain in the but.

That said, if your like me and ended up with one for nothing or already bought one thinking you were gonna save some money, Don't lose hope it can actually work.
I'm assuming we are all using a 27sf512 ic chip. I'm writing this based on a 32kb bin. The only stable version of topwin I found was v5.x. 6.2 and 2.52 worked twice then continually crashed. The others wouldn't work at all. If you google topwin all these programs can easily be found.

• You need to setup your usb port to 1.0 speed. 12mb/sec I believe. Even after that change my laptop (native usb 1.0) works much more reliably than my desktop (native usb 2.0). The desktop gives me errors most of the time but will eventually burn a good chip. The laptop with all the settings identical works every time.

• Edit the .lst file for your model. Mine was device853.lst. Open with notepad and find this line: EEP SST SST27SF512 ,SST27SF 2,vcc=5000,dly=3 the ,vcc=5000,dly=3 is what you have to add. Just make sure it looks like that when you're done.

• Give up on trying to use an offset. I wasted hours, topwin screws it up everytime. I was later advised try 7fff offset instead of 8000 but never tried it. The easy solution was to Use tunerpro to stack the bin. Worked every time since.

• In order to read a chip that had been burned with an offset instead of stacked I had to tell topwin that it was a 27sf256 chip. Otherwise it just filled the window with FF.

If you haven't bought a burner yet buy a Moates seriously. I didn't write this to sing the praises of a piece o junk top burner. Just to help the guys out holding one in their hands pulling their hair out.

 

I currently use an older parallel port Pocket Programmer II and have been looking to upgrade soon. During my research I found a lot of complaints about most all of the ebay Chinese burners. The TOP unit in particular seemed to have a lot of problems.
For sure I'll be buying a Moates burner soon. Although I first plan on getting an Ostrich2 sometime in the next sixty days.

I would definitely suggest to somebody looking for eprom burning hardware hardware to only consider units with full USB. I found out the hard way that Win7 will not allow me to change the port address on the motherboard I bought specifically because it also had a built in parallel port. Then Win7 also refused to allow an addon parallel port card to work with my PP2. I have had to resort to resurrecting an older computer (from my personal electronics boneyard) just dedicated to burning chips. Parallel port is effectively dead, and a standard serial port is following VERY closely behind.

 

i LOVE my BURN2 for it's simplicity, but the newest series of willems burners will do SO much more, great for someone into flashing more than just PROMs for ECMs.

 

With the Willems if you want to reflash a 27SF512 do you need to have a seperate 12v power source or is it powered by the usb alone?

 

http://www.mcumall.com/comersus/stor...idProduct=4282

allows for both USB and a wall adapter?

 

I have both a Willems GQ-3X and a BURN2.

The GQ-3X programs the SST 27SF512 just fine powered by USB.

I love my BURN2 for it's ease of use, especially when used with Tuner Pro RT's built in interace. TP RT automatically sets the offsets.

My BURN2 is part of my tuning bag, my Willems stays at home to be used with my PC, when I need to program EPROMs for other than automotive use.

 

^^ THIS.

 

Kudos to saar for helping me figure some of this out

 

different forum, but yeah, no problem

 

I have a pocket programmer that I have not turned on in years.

-- Joe