it's like an elephant graveyard in my hobby room
Posted: Wed Aug 07, 2013 4:39 am
So i've recently been going through my collection of machines that have been sitting idle for a few months. My PET 2001, my Apple II and OSI 4P all had issues when they were working great just a few months ago. I fixed the Apple II. One of the masked ROMs was bad. it was an relatively easy fix (maybe an hour of testing) as at one point I did the finger test to see if any of the IC's were getting hot. The culprit ROM was certainly hotter than the others and it was one of the first things I changed out. One down, two to go.
I powered up my 4P last night, but I was greeted with a screen full of garbage, no reset. I had only just fixed an issue with the video on this machine, and it had been sitting idle for a few months. My temporary fix was to drop in a known working spare 505 board... I'll have to see what's wrong with the original CPU board sometime soon i guess as I hate to have non working stuff lying around. Hopefully it should be an easy fix. Fingers crossed.
The PET is still dead, it seemed to die slowly in that I was greeted by a screen of random characters, but could still make out the boot text a little, and type stuff that would appear also as random characters, but it soon died completely. Now just a screen of weirdness...not sure how to progress, may need some time to get this up and running again.
Maybe it's got something to do with the high humidity and heat here in Japan in the summer, but boy these old machines are hard to keep going. I can't imagine it'll get easier as time progresses.
P
I powered up my 4P last night, but I was greeted with a screen full of garbage, no reset. I had only just fixed an issue with the video on this machine, and it had been sitting idle for a few months. My temporary fix was to drop in a known working spare 505 board... I'll have to see what's wrong with the original CPU board sometime soon i guess as I hate to have non working stuff lying around. Hopefully it should be an easy fix. Fingers crossed.
The PET is still dead, it seemed to die slowly in that I was greeted by a screen of random characters, but could still make out the boot text a little, and type stuff that would appear also as random characters, but it soon died completely. Now just a screen of weirdness...not sure how to progress, may need some time to get this up and running again.
Maybe it's got something to do with the high humidity and heat here in Japan in the summer, but boy these old machines are hard to keep going. I can't imagine it'll get easier as time progresses.
P