This is a hack which is very similar to the DesperRAM. It was born out of pure despair, so it’s neither elegant nor very clever – but it works and that’s what counts.

During the “BOZO resurrection“, I had one specific PAL under suspicion to not working correctly any more. That PAL was soldered (i.e. not socketed) onto the board in a very tight spot, so I wasn’t able to cut the pins as close as possible down on the board.
I know, there are special pliers which can somewhat around corners, but my trustworthy Knipex (The pliers maker in the world, full stop.) can’t. So I had to cut the pins right at the PALs package – easy and quick.

The downside is that this method leaves you with a leg-less IC… and if you then decide it might be useful to read-out that IC (like I did) it’s time to slap your forehead :-/
But not so fast, young Padawan. Despair has the advantage that it normally can’t get worse, so nothing to lose. Even you cut the legs off you still can spot the tiny remains leading into the package. So why not trying to replace the amputated legs with artificial limbs!?

My initial thought was soldering new pins to the package, but the remaining connection is way too small to allow anything to be soldered to it but a human hair.
So I used a socket, turned upside-down, slightly bent the legs inward, squeezed the PAL between the sockets legs and carefully soldered the pins to the case-connectors. Finally I put small bits of wire into the sockets empty holes to create new pins to connect the whole thing to my GAL-programmer. Voilá: FrankenPAL

Yes, it looks horrible and I was quite sure that this doesn’t work but it just costed me 10 minutes, so what the heck, let’s try read-out that beast.

What should I say? It worked right on the first try… So never despair as long as you have a working solder iron 😉