Cheap TOP2005 EEPROM Programmer. It Sucks – Or Does it?

In our investigation of the hardware and software, we came to the conclusion that the hardware is doing basically what it is told.   But the software is the true piece of junk.   Now we considered rewriting it from scratch, but that’s a long project and doesn’t really fit with our immediate desire to simply read/write a few micros.

Now when searching the web, we found two camps: Americans who hated it and Chinese who thought it was great.   How could this be?   Were the Chinese so technically competent that they could click a “Read” button better than we could?   Maybe they had better features, like a “Disable piece of crap mode” – that’s really what we needed.
So we downloaded the Chinese version and pow!   The thing worked like a charm.   It was hell trying to read the chinese characters that were just being interpreted as junk on our system, but the thing worked!

So we opened up both disassemblies and began comparing.   Wow, the English version was in quite a state of disrepair.   I’m not sure if they had a whole different team working on it, or whether they tried to do the translation automatically.   But it ended up corrupting a lot of returns and we closed the disassembler on the lost cause of the English version.


But did we give up?   No way!   We decided it would be easier to hack the chinese version back into an english version than it would be to try and fix their code.   So we downloaded a copy of Resource Hacker and got started.   Sadly, it seems like every single device has it’s own program window so there was a lot of work to do.   But here’s the process:

1. Export all the RCData’s as .dfm text files
2. Build a giant list of Chinese->English conversions
3. Use   Multiple File Search & Replace to update as many as possible
4. Go clean up the rest manually.

Our rules file ended up having about 80 rules, refined over time by looking at what the replace was missing.   Wow, we found some really bad practices in the software – like using different words for Write in about 5 different places.   What the hell, guys?   Get it together!

But all-in-all, we got ourselves a fairly usable tool in just about a day.   We could read enough to get by, and the thing finally WORKED!   The translation is definitely not complete, so feel free to post comments about any fixes we may have missed that you know the answer to.   We’ll update our dfm files and spew out a new version.

Here is our zip file of all the updated dfm’s in their current state

DFM Resource Files for Editing TopWin Software

And here is our zip file of the English-ified Chinese version of TopWin

The WORKING English Version of Top2005 software

And here’s a link to the original software downloads at top2048.com

Manufacturer’s Software Page at top2048.com

To use our version, simply drop it into the same directory as your standard TopWin software.   Change the start menu link to point to ours, or update the file name and you should be in business.   We verified the tool by dumping into both the English version of TopWin (TopWinen 3.5) and the slightly newer Chinese version (Topwin 3.53).   No differences were found, but it is probably safer to download and install the Chinese version and just replace the exe with our English-ified version.   3.53 supports a few more devices so maybe there’s a new bitstream or two in 3.53.Good luck, and feel free to post your success or failure stories as well as any improvements you find.