I got one of these a few months ago from eBay for about $50. Has supported every ancient & modern chip I've thrown at it so far (even parts not on the device list by using clever substitutions) except for the 27C1024 (16-bit wide 128K EPROM), it even came with two PLCC adapters for free!. The only time it failed it was caused by a flaky USB cable. Software isn't very well translated but it does the job. If you like Engrish, read the manual for a good laugh.

Pros:
* Great device compatibility (it even takes those crazy ancient 21V parts)
* Software works on Windows 7 x64
* True USB (power + data)
* Good build quality for a Chinese product
* Cheap. If you're on a budget and don't want to mess with parallel port programmers, this is the way to go.

Cons:
* Software is proprietary and Windows only
* Software is a bit quirky and full of Engrish (eventually you'll get used to it)
* Seems to top up at 1MB for EPROM and 512KB for Flash even though it has more than enough pins

You might also want to take a look at the G840, the successor of the G540. I also second the suggestion of getting a UV eraser. I've made one myself with the internals of a small air purifier and a project box, but you can get cheap ones on eBay that will do the job.

Ah, the AMI Color BIOS . I had a 486 motherboard with it and I remember a Pentium-era motherboard which had both a standard text-mode BIOS and the graphical one, user selectable.

If you used the AMI Color BIOS with a pre-VGA adapter it would use text characters to draw the GUI elements and the pointer, much like old DOS programs.

Thanks for the nostalgia trip, by the way.

It does! Xell spits out the CPU key and the DVD key at the boot console. Just have a digital camera handy!

It will die when solid-state media like NAND Flash reaches throw-away prices, at least for small capacities. DVD-R discs are so cheap now they're essentially a disposable off-line distribution system.

Until I can buy something like a 10-pack of SD cards for $2, I'll have to keep my optical drives around.

Long ago I had a Macintosh PowerBook 145 which did something similar. If I suddenly powered off the machine and powered it back on a while later, the monochrome LCD would show the contents of the display buffer prior to the shutdown for a split second after the startup chime but before the usual checkerboard pattern, with varying degrees of corruption depending on how long the machine stayed off. It held a recognizable image for a surprisingly long time. I remember reading that this particular laptop uses pseudo-static RAM so I attributed such behavior to that.

I also remember that a friend's beige G3 showed some remnants of old video memory contents as well. It took several seconds to generate a valid video signal from a cold boot, in those intermediate states it would sometimes display "pieces" of whatever was left in VRAM from the previous session. That one had SGRAM for its video chipset if I remember correctly.

Clearly that person has been playing too much Portal.

For video games it is, they share the same region (because of the legacy NTSC TV standard).

...because we can use it for games!

put in a rectifier diode in line, only lets the smarts through!
or better yet, a bridge rectifier turns the stupid into smarts!

Magnets, how do they work?

Seriously, they use neodymium magnets on the screen to trigger a reed switch on the motherboard to signal the computer that the lid has been closed. I assume the magnet on the bottom computer is triggering the lid closed sensor on the top computer thus putting it in sleep mode.

In my experience it's pretty easy to spot malware when English menu options and stuff start appearing on a non-English Windows installation, such as "Open" or "Open folder to view files" for thumbdrives while the rest of the options show up in the local language, sometimes malware can even bork the system because of it (like in the olden days of Windows 9x when installing IE in a different language caused all sorts of havoc in the OS)

Even with such a blatant language mismatch most users simply won't notice anything wrong with their systems until it bites them really hard.

The NES had its own unauthorized software lockout mechanism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10NES

The more things change, the more things stay the same. (thin electron gun Trinitron CRTs, capacitor plague, lead-free solder etc)

I've had both types: an old one that kept time and sounded the alarm on backup power and my current one that just keeps the time and sounds the alarm as soon as the power comes back. I presume that running the whole radio/buzzer at a decent volume until your lazy ass wakes up would drain the tiny 9V battery in a pinch.

It's just cheap cut-corner design. Your wall powered alarm clock uses the mains frequency (50 or 60 Hz) as its timebase which is very precise because power companies pride themselves on cycle accuracy. When the power goes out, an internal RC oscillator takes the place of the AC timebase. It barely passes for a basic timekeeping source as you have already noticed, since you can't get any real accuracy from such a cheap way of doing things. A quartz crystal instead of the RC crap would keep the clock highly accurate on all conditions but it would cost a few extra cents per unit, a big no-no for our Chinese manufacturing overlords. At least they bias it to get you up earlier instead of later.

Another way to make these really obvious is to use your operating system with any language other than English. Malware writers don't bother with localization, so their fake error messages always display in English regardless of your actual OS language. Even the USB autorun viruses are dead easy to spot, you know something's fishy when there's a lonely English menu option in the Autorun dialog, usually "Open folder to view files" while the rest aren't.

Amazingly, most people still click on the damned things.