exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

When we were building the remake Atari I was touting the Eiffel interface as a great solution for using a normal keyboard and ps2 mouse. I have two of them since I purchased two mega's with no keyboard so not wanting to pay an a rediculious amount for an actual Atari keyboard I use the Eiffel which works well. However I have had a third pick get amnesia. Totally dead with no lights. I have erased the pic chips and reprogrammed them but if you can't burn a pic this could be a big pain in the ass. So in two years with two Eiffels I have had three pic's forget what there purpose is. They were all recoverable by reprogramming but could be a pain with no programmer.

That's unusual. Aren't they supposed to remember for about 50 years or something?

That what I thought.. happened on two machines though so there must be something going on. Maybe power or programming.... I have a couple standing by for the next failure. All the failures so far have come from Eiffel so we will see if the ones I reprogammed fail.

Odd. If one fails I would verify it is the pic program lost before anything else. So you would need a programmer.

I'm curious to see if the programming I've done lasts. I erased and reprogrammed the pics that failed. They all failed on powerup. Working fine but when powered on stone cold dead.