Yesterday finally took the plunge and bought a new EPROM programmer for my lab. My old EPROM programmer suddenly decided to give up when I really needed it the most so there wasn't really much to do other than to start looking for a new one. Since I work a lot with old Prophet-5 synthesizers I needed an programmer capable of programming old 2708 and 2716 EPROM's. In contrast to the old 2708 and 2716 EPROM's I also wanted a programmer capable of programming the latest 32-bit microprocessors from Microchip (PIC32). After some serious considerations I finally decided to buy an ELNEC BeeProg+ although it turned out to be more than twice the price of what I initially was prepared to pay for a new programmer.

So, back to work with the Prophet's ... During the last couple of years I done some reverse engineering of the firmware regarding the firmware of the Prophet-5 rev-2. One thing I've been able to fix in the firmware is to prevent it from hanging during auto-tune if one of the voices is malfunctioning. In the latest version I've been able to add support for enabling and disabling individual voices through the program selection buttons.

NOTE: Please, don't send me inquires about selling EPROM's with the updated firmware for the Prophet-5. I have no clue about the copyright issues of the firmware. Fiddling with the firmware of the Prophet-5 is solely for my own personal interest. For general inquires about EPROM  programming, please refer to our vintage synthesizer repair page.