Excited by the arrival of my new Romulator card from SECTOR101 (link), I set about looking into how to program the cards with the card programmer. I use a Mac and at the moment, do not have $40 to pay for the fantastic Serial Terminal Emulator by Decisive Tactics and therefore needed a free solution. I rarely use serial devices and could not justify the costs since gifts tend to go to new hardware for new editors. I found an excellent, cross platform solution, the wonderful CoolTerm which can be downloaded from here (link).
I have a newer Romulator programmer, v2.04a that can update old and new cards. This is my guide that I record for my reference. As per usual, if you follow along – it’s at your own risk! If you are interested in my configuration file. At a comment to the bottom of blog post and always remember, monophreak are fuelled by ByMeCoffees. If you like what I do and I have saved you time, please gift (link) and help me keep my website alive.
To begin, click on the ‘Options’ icon on the top of the app.
Start by configuring the serial port. On my version of the programmer with a USB cable plugged into a USB 2 to C convertor, my baud rate did not match the value from the SECTOR101 Mac Guide but familiar with serial emulation, I located the correct value. Setting the parity to odd is particularly important, failure to do this will cause the file loading step to fail at the end.
Key settings:
Port: USBModem14301 (Romulator Programmer)
Baudrate: 115200
Parity: Odd
Move onto the next option on the left, Terminal:
Under Terimnal, I switched the Enter Key Emulation and NumPad Enter Emulation to CR
I then moved onto Data Handling
I selected Handle BS and DEL characters.
I then moved onto Transmit options.
I added the [X] Use transmit character delay, Delay (ms): 0.0000347 gleaned from the wonderful guide by Kevin Meinert (source Romulator SR-JV page) and clickedthe blue OK button. This will update to 0 on save but that’s okay. This setting is important. If you leave it at 3, it will take ages to transmit a file when you send it over.
Click the connect button to connect. If you see garbled information, change the baudrate.
Type in
ER ALLto erase the card and get it ready for the new data set.
Load up the new data set by typing in
PRG 8192Note that this loads in a card size of 8.4MB. For different card sizes, use alternative sizes 1024, 2048, and 4096.
Click on the connection menu item and select Send Files(s)…
Select Transfer Protocol ‘Raw’, click on the blue ‘Select File…’ button and location the .bin file. If it’s zipped, unzip it first.
You will see a send message at the top. When this is finished, you will see a completed message at the bottom.
When you are finished.
Click the disconnect button.