This video made me appreciate the Retro Chip Tester Pro much more than I did. No false negatives AND false positives, more thorough testing, support for a crapload of ICs, support for other voltages than just +5V, and no manual routing of said voltages. Before this review I took those for granted. For this reason I think this was a great review!

I absolutely love my BackBit Chip Tester. I have been involved since the early days and I am impressed in Evie's dedication to improving the product. I have found a few issues but she instantly replied with fixes. The product is for ever expanding. Support is more important than anything else.

One awesome thing is if you've got chips to donate, she implement tests for them. I've recently sent an Atari VCS processor, TIA and the 8 bit computers chips, GTIA, ANTIC, POKEY and the XL MMU, of the which the 6507 and the MMU are in the firmware now. She'll add the others soon, I'm sure.

noel you should update to the latest firmware and do a "RE" review of the device to see if some of the failures you found have been fixed. Evie is really great and fast at fixing result faults. and this device test way more chips out of different machines now. it also does the 4116 ram chips if you have the adapter for it.

Great review! With the false negatives you got at the beginning it would be easy for you to give a very negative review, but you were very fair, I thought. At least until the firmware has matured somewhat, I wouldn’t consider the Backbit though. It’s great that it can test MOS chips, but as you showed, it throws up false positives and negatives rather too often. The entire point of a chip tester is to be able to say if a chip is faulty or not. If you can’t trust the results, then it isn’t really helping you trace an error that much. I would rather have a tester that couldn’t test a chip than one that could test it, but afterwards you still aren’t sure if it works or not.

Mine just came in today and the first thing I tested was a SID chip I had. Passed! Thanks for reviewing this. I was in need of a chip tester and this review did it for me!

Very thorough as always, thanks for another great video! I think it's about time I invested in one of these, it certainly saves a lot of messing around 😬

Great video! Very informative and it's exactly what I needed to make my decision if I should purchase it or not. It's a cool little device and love how quick she responded to you to get it working correctly on some issues you found.

Chip testers are now like video streaming services. You'll need 4-5 of them to cover everything!

After watching your video one more time and comparing the two testers. I went ahead and purchased the BackBit Chip Tester Pro. For two or three reasons. First, is that it comes assembled and ready to use out of the box. Although I was looking forward to putting the Retro Chip tester together. The second reason was that the BackBit Chip tester will test the 6502 model CPUs, where as the Retro Chip tester will not. Third, I would love to be able to use the Backbit Chip tester to test chips in circuit, without having to remove them. That would be amazing. Thank you for this review !!!

I just purchased the current version of the BackBit chip tester and with the exception of some Atari TIA chips it seemed to be on the mark in proper testing for me. In the case of the TIA chips, it was able to correctly tell me that a TIA had a fault on the audio. It actually has audio working in both channels, but some tones and sounds don't seem to actually work when they should so that was pretty cool. There is also an adapter you can purchase separately now for testing 4116 chips but I haven't purchased that one to give any thoughts on it. I do like that Evie is quite active on her forums as Noel mentioned, she is quick to make changes and updates to the firmware if she has the info needed.

There’s another chip tester, the MOD-HIC from Modular Circuit Technology (if you can find it.) I’ve had mine for several decades, and works off of a 9v battery. It also has a DC barrel jack, but it doesn’t label if it’s center-positive or center-negative. While it only has a 20-pin ZIF socket, it tests pretty much all 74-series TTL (except the 74154, which has 24 pins), and some of the higher-numbered chips. It also covers most 40/45-series CMOS, and some DRAM. It can identify most TTL/CMOS, and you can select a specific chip from its menu if it mis-identifies a chip. Physically, it’s about the size of that one you reviewed in this video, but is thicker (because of the 9v battery compartment.) Unfortunately, there’s no way to update the firmware. 😥

Thanks! I have the previous version of this tool, and never realized it could check the ZX81 ULA! As I am debugging a ZX81 right now I was quickly able to discover the ULA was indeed broken (sad face) which saves me a lot of time!

Thanks for this great video ! I am making my own 8-bit computer recently and I encountered issues with a faulty Z80 CPU... I wish I had such tester, I would have saved a lot of time😄

Great video as usual Noel! Those black and green clips for the ICs, can you tell me how they're called and where you got them?

Another great video Noel, is there a commercial chip checker and programmer you sometimes use or recommend? Looking forward to the next video!

Great video thanks, already wanted to type a question about the voltages for the Sid and vic :) but then you answered them.

Looks wonderful!

Brill ! i really enjoyed the video and I really like the small form factor of that design , and I really liked the designer made changes to the firmware on the fly , it shows there passionate about there product , I think it's time to add it to the collection of things to use, fingers crossed they deliver to the uk , I hadn't checked that far.. to add I have awaiting for the big green beauty to come back into stock in the uk. Its Finally back! 🤜🤛

I love the box of shame and FAKE, lol. The BackBit seems like a decent deal for what it does, and the support and communications appears to be outstanding. Great and thorough review!

Just FYI, the 74LS38 is open-collector. Without an external pull-up it can never output a logic '1'. Perhaps you should try some other (known good) open collector parts to see if they pass?

I love my backbit, fixed a few c64's using it, along with a diag cart. I only deal with commodore machines, so it's fine. You have peaked my interest in the other device however, and if you can build it yourself, seems like fun!

I have no need for a chip tester - I have no chips to test. Yet, I am compelled to watch.

A very nice review Noel, thank you very much! And I love the "box of shame" :-D Greetings, Michael

I have the BackBit chip tester and I like it. Especially for RAM or reading out EPROMs etc. I doubt that it is very accurate, though and I would like to have a test description somewhere, so I can estimate the quality of the test. A false failed is hmmm... I mean, we are dealing with chips that are getting rare and dumping one, that is still good is bad.

It has good potential, hopefully continued firmware updates can fix most of the issues. It's easy to trash something like this (which you didn't at all to clarify), but keep in mind all the great work people do to create products like this for old computers. New products, replacements, tools, whatever it is, I'm just very happy that we have more and more to chose from. That's just great for all of us in the end. It would be sad if people don't release their hard, usually hobby based and mostly unpaid work, for the fear of people expecting everything to be prosumer grade stuff when that's not really a fair comparison.

Hi Noel, watched that vid of the BackBit tester and was wondered if it vould test a MC6802P and 6821P? The RetroChip tester from Stephan does not support those processors. Would be handy if those are supported.

The GAL20V8 is used in an inexpensive PLA replacement board. Coincidence that it's tested by the BackBit? I think not. In-circuit: I did not see you push the selector knob once you selected In-Circuit. Doesn't that act as the "enter" key for a selection?

Any chance to take a look at the Tauntek IC Tester too?

How good is it at identifying chips e.g. where the numbers have been sanded off?

What about iAPX-86 UCAS , Anyone know if you can buy it , Also 286 and MOS testers coming out.

Take it apart and see whats inside, please.

Very useful for detecting fakes and remarks. Do you have anything that will spot fake power mosfets?

Mine arrrived a few days ago but have not used it yet. I have bunches of chips to test from C64 boards. Thanks for reviewing it.

I greatly dislike when a product abuses USB like this. Type A is not the correct choice for a terminal, it's a host side port. They should've gone with B or C

6515 and u444 sram? is good for trhem? and how i must wait to?

The limitation of 5VDC only IC power kills the deal right at the start. Ideal solution I'd like to see: Retro Chip Tester Pro capabilities - motherboard with SMT transistors and voltage conversion circuitry pre-soldered - control comes from use of one of the dirt cheap, miniature Arduino clones, whichever one has adequate accessible I/O pins and storage, plugged into the motherboard; also makes "firmware" update easy - 5VDC power comes from a PC via USB and all control input and test results are controlled via an app, much like a TL866 Programmer.

It would be hard to fit all chips in testers in that price range. I could see however that the Back Bit's potential could be great since it's all flashed via an SD card.

Cool video, keep it up, thanks :)

Nice to see the famous blue commodore back into action.

Awesome video again! Somewhat related: does anyone know of any affortable 30/72/168 pin simm/dimm testers? I have tried googling for one and the cheapest I foudn was $3000+ ..slightly more than I was hoping for lol

On the in circuit testing I can see many issues in getting everything connected correctly. There are so many wires to connect that a problem with any one of them could cause the test to fail.

You probably need a Tester for the Retro Chip Tester :D

I love the look of it, and the SD firmware update is a win. :)

I have the BACKBIT chip tester which is great for Commodore chips - Do I need the PRO now?

It'd be cool to see other FM sound chips in there. The AY-3-8910, in particular. Also, still no way to test the 64-pin 68000 CPU. 😭

You jumpered an extra 5 volt for the one chip and all the rest failed ! Did they also need 2 plus 5V for the rest of them ?

False fails on a US$149 tester is not particularly impressive. Sound like this needs more debugging/ proper testing before it should command a $149 price tag. Manual power wiring is a bit of a deal breaker too, at this price.

Evie from Backbit has really supported the Commodore world - Did she have comments about some of the chip test?

Dam, its on backorder and will br for a while.

...a tube tester for ICs....how cool is that?👍

The retrochip tester pro costs 550 usd in ebay where you got it for 110 euro ?

It's definitely more noob friendly that's for sure!! However big plus for me being pre made much simpler experience

Also have no need to test chips, but I really want to now! Bit worrying that this seems to give various false negatives.

So there are firmware updates, but I'm guessing you can't actually change or add test scripts.

Your review is similar to reviews of other products she's made. She updates firmware very quickly.

Having to place in the jumper wires for the various power requirements seems a little hokey. The system seems to know what and where power is needed, it should just make those connections for you. One less important thing that can go wrong.

Man, doing the wiring manually makes you look even more like a crack, while others are watching you doing the magic! xD But it's a bit too expensive I think .. wished it was like 79€ - given they fixed all the bugs.Also I wonder how far it can test the older SID without 12V .. I guess storage isn't the limit, because testing procedures could be saved on SD card.

Coming Soon: 4116 DRAM Adapter: Applies -5V and 12V voltage for testing 4116 DRAM chips (page 12)

If the backbit one had the option to use an external ATX PSU(either connected directly upon it, or at least jumpered manually like the other voltages) it would be nice. Ask for(another...) one firmware update! 😁

I believe this uses an STM32.

When testing in circuit, you shouldn’t connect the power leads to the board. At least, you don’t do that with the non-pro version.

Just an update. 4116 ram tester adapter coming soon.

lol MT ram of course it failed.

To me, this chip tester looks like a ic recorder :)

Heh ... without the proper analog voltage, it'll be able to tell if it's completely dead or not ... but it can't do any qualification as to the audio/video signal quality. The analog biases will be completely off.

I use original PCB s with Zero force sockets

$149 and you have to operate it like an old phone exchange? No, thanks.

We had that lawsuite back in the 1980's the result verdict was "you can not blame a man for trying." the lawyer pointed out. that "the human race dont have too become , die out. due too wrong judgementdt". end of story. some jurisprediction there.

Hi. Help me. I want to buy it

woodchuck!

Nice video and interesting device - but it looks like you were beta testing for them. I mean... the 7400 series ICs are well known and should be no-brainers to test. But still, very nice product and video!

the minipro does this and more for $60

Regardless the people making something should not have to to deal with people pulling lines high and low because they didn't pay attention

Initially about as reliable as a pcr test!

Interesting comparing this with the original 1986 Precision Motion Chiptester: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/hat9rZaQydvWcn0.html

Good review! Why the tester doesn't know where to put ground and power by itself? Setting the wires manually for every chip type is not a good solution. Btw, I modded the 4116 chip tester that you showed in one of your reviews. Now it is safer and more user-friendly. The videos with the link to the repository with all the files (new firmware, Gerbers, case, etc.) could be found here: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/qtqensKQ15y-qIk.html kzfaq.info/get/bejne/rqmgqrijydbOg40.html kzfaq.info/get/bejne/abl_kqR_t5i2ZKM.html

Power over USB-A is a bit unusual...

First thing I've noticed is, the case is partly 3D printed. Looks like the owner is not thinking of having many orders.

Very interesting video ... but .... AAAAHH! 🕷A spider!

Sadly these are now on indefinite backorder until sometime in 2023 at least :-/

I think you are a bit gracious with your conclusion about the BackBit Chip Tester Pro. You did throw bad chips on it which it tested good, and you throw good chips on it which it tested bad. A chip tester you can not trust is worth nothing. In the worst case, it makes you buy and replace chips that are totally fine or lead you into a complete wrong direction as it tells you a bad chip is good.

The manual routing of the voltages is a deal breaker. No, thank you. Way too much room for destructive error.

116 VIEWS AND U GOT 139 LIKE , HOW?

It's really a shame that you can't trust the test results. What is the use of this tester then. Then I prefer to test in a C64 and check signals with the oscilloscope! A real shame! But really great video! Thank you! Best regards, Doc64!

Iam VietNam

Looks just like a kit

$ 149 dollar for a tester that works like 50% of the time. No thanks.

Well, the Chip Tester reported some good chips as faulty, and some faulty chips as good. So basically, you could replace it by throwing a coin. To put a long story short: If you can't trust a device, don't buy it!

What's the point having a chip tester that doesn't test the chip thoroughly? For it to be any good, all pins and functions must be tested.

What an excellent review. I bought one of these about a month ago because i have so many DRAM and Commodore chips and it would be nice to test them. I mostly dig it and love the form factor. That said I have found, like you, a few instances where it isn't quite accurate. I think the CBM chips are a pretty tough crowd because they can vary from chip to chip. Especially this is true of the SID chips. All of the ones I had that I tested all failed. None passed good. At the least they all failed the POT XY which was false because they all worked with my 1351 mouse. Many of the chips that tested bad later tested good after I power cycled the device. That said, the creator is very responsive with issues and I have no doubt that in another 6 months this product will be solid as a rock. It is still pretty new and lets face it, indie developers like this can't test it with 100's of users until they release it. I am hoping that she adds some Amiga chips to the mix as many of those should be testable here. I thoroughly enjoy your videos, keep up the good work.