Poll:Do you use an EPROM PROGRAMMER?

I sometimes use them for unintended purposes, often more convenient and even faster than serial memory. They are cheap and free in dumpsters and clearly for ROM like uses, but I don't see as many NVSRAM there. EPROMS were cheaper than but useable as PALs GALs and CUPL. (Is CUPL still expensive?) One example of an EPROM project is a frequency counter using a binary counter and the EPROM as a multiple digit binary-7seg converter. No microcontroller needed. Counts much faster than a basic stamp. Another example (similar circuit) is video animation or test patterns. I was just wondering if there were a lot in everyone else's junkbox for projects like that. Oh, I have a few programmers, the EMP-10 happens to be the last one I got. I like the convenience of telling DOS to generate a special hex file for me as needed, something which I don't know what else can do it that's "new" and cheap. The first two I built myself, and I also built a PIC1654 programmer because it was cheaper to do than whatever the dev kit costed then. "I wish" someone could tell me how to do things as fast on new computers as old ones, but "I doubt" it, since the old ones even boot faster, with average only 1 MIPS. If the PC's died, we could bootstrap an APPLE I and APPLE II in a day or so, just with eproms, batteries, switches, and lights. (In other words, EPROMS are nice if need to start from scratch.) We once bootstrapped a 6809 through the joystick ports of an Atari 400, (burning it's eprom) which had a dot matrix screen made of rotating LED displays of the kind we now call "POV", cute sounds, and a surplus TI-99-4A keyboard. Oh, and when we goofed up our EPROMs, well we had a bunch, and we'd place them overnight on top of a UV bug-zapper-lamp to clear them. :0

Multi-digit decode: Lets say you have a 27512 and want 8 digits. Use the lowest bits as part of the LED cathode selector. Fill the eprom with segment patterns like 00000000 00000001 00000002 Put the binary number you want displayed in decimal on the higher address bits. oops...27512 only leaves enough bits to go up to 00008192, so use a bigger eprom. When writing a basic program to make the hex file, leave out the zeros on the left if you want. POV or "multiplexing" is happening here like on old Sinclair calculators. Another use besides frequency readout is digital meters. (But ICL7107 is cheap, and so are already made meters, so it would be good for a custom nonlinear scale.)