RE: Logic Analyzers....

> TEK 1240 or an HP 1320 (if I got the model #'s correct...)
>
I use a Tek 1241 and really like it-- there's a lot of different
configurations possible. (D1 and D2 cards provide either 9 or 18
channels of aquisition.)

With the nine channel cards you can run quite fast-- 100MHz sync. For
games though usually more channels is better than speed. The Teks have
ROM cartridges that are *really* handy-- mnemonic disassembly of 6502,
Z-80, 6809, etc. Shows all t-states and whatnot. VERY nice. VERY hard
to find the carts though. There's also carts for printer support,
novRAM storage of setups etc. Aquisition pods can be hard to find
though. On the good side, 1240 and 1241 stuff is interchangeable. (The
1241 is basically a 1240 with a color display and a little different
firmware.)

The pre-configured "processor" clips are really nice if you can find
them-- they plug directly into the Pods and work with the mnemonic carts
so you just hook one 40-pin clip to the processor and off you go.

It might be hard to find one for $500 though... Maybe a ham-fest or
surplus place if you get lucky would have one cheap. Otherwise they're
still quite useful so demand keeps the price up at the used equipment
shops. We still have a 1240 here at work that's about the only thing
the engineers will use. We also have a big snarling-drooling HP
16C550, but it uses a HP PA-RISC UNIX box for the UI and is a little
involved to use... (It's impressive though-- cost about half what my
house did, 272 channels (or something) with 2Mwords of 40-bit wide trace
buffer PER CHANNEL.)

If I had one complaint about the 1240 is that the trace buffers are a
little shallow-- 512 bytes in general. You can play some tricks with
multiple cards though and use the memory on other aquisition cards for
deeper buffer. I used my 1241 a lot while working on cracking Pacman
Plus and The Glob-- with my configuration (three 18 channel cards and
one 9 channel card) I got about 700 instructions in capture memory.
Enough for hacking and exploring.

I really like the UI for the Tek stuff (smooth scrolling, little
"spinner" wheel for whizzing past stuff fast), but some people swear by
the HP's...

-Clay
Received on Mon Jan 4 19:31:26 1999