QuarterArcade Coin-Op Tech Net

Introduction

This page describes various notes about creating a Fluke 9100A Programming Station. You will need to find a Fluke 9100A or Fluke 9100FT with a video card. The video card is fairly hard to find. Often it is easier to find one on a 9105 or a broken 9100.

This will be my documentation about the process that I went through to learn about the Fluke 9100A, and get it set up. Hopefully you will find this helpful if you are considering using a 9100A for your repairs.

This is a picture of a full blown programming station. In addition to the base unit, the programming unit also consists of a monitor and a proprietary keyboard. Also shown in this picture are several "-003" I/O module units which are very helpful for testing chips.

Install/Upgrade Software

Upgrading should be done so that you do not have to worry about node locking. The latest system software version is v6.0.

You will need "Double Density" not "High Density" disks. When I read this, I didn't believe it. Believe it. I suspect that this is because of the older manufacturing process by which the disks are made so that sectors are physically magnitized in larger blocks on the disk. This is just a guess. But whatever the reason, if you don't use true 2D (also known as DD) disks, then your install will fail when you go to read the disk on the 9100A. I was able to purchase about 50 disks on eBay for about $5 IIRC.

What you will want to do is find an older computer with a DOS based operating system. I used a Windows 98 machine running a 233 MHz processor. Some people have reported disk errors when using faster machines, so keep that in mind when your making your master disks. What you want to do is get the 9100 floppy images from the TTL FTP server (ftp://ftp.flippers.com/, look in the /TTL/Fluke/9100_Fixture directory).

You want to create a set of disks when each of the following systems: Master User Disks, System Disks, Programmer Software, and optionally the IEE488 disk. Use the disk utility Teledisk to make your disk images. You don't have to format your DD first, as Teledisk will lay down the disk track by track (basically). Now, when I did this, I had problems using the version of Teledisk on the TTL FTP site. I think that is version 2.16. I had to go back to version 2.11 to successfully create my disks on my computer. Again, your milage may vary.

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