There is also a program called xiload which is menu-driven and is possibly more useful than xidump for general XTB experiments. It allows individual commands, or files containing commands, to be sent to the XTB and the returned values to be seen. Because of this, the XTB `W' command is not buffered, and sending .dat files takes rather longer than with xictrl.
Work is being done to allow more general access to the serial ports on the back of Unix machines. This generally involves running a special daemon under inetd.
Serial PROMs are more complex than many other memories. It should be easy now to emulate various other chips.
The HDL should really be rewritten to use more of a state-machine model, rather than being so clock-based. This version seems to work reliably, but I'm not sure how good it would be at different clock frequencies.
Quentin Stafford-Fraser
February 1992