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The Pictorial C64 Fault Guide
- flohofwoe 3y agoHaving written a C64 emulator before (https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/c64-ui.html https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/c64-ui.html) I find it incredibly fascinating that some of those hardware errors look very similar to visual artefacts I got in the early stages of the emulator when trying to get the VIC-II timing right :)
- unwind 3y agoThat is a fantastic emulator, for some reason nobody has commented and I just felt someone had to say it. :) I love all the focus on really nice-looking built-in tooling, memory heatmap and execution history are really cool to have! Great job! Is there a way to load software into it? The "Load Snapshot" menu option is blank ...
- flohofwoe 3y agoThanks! You can drag'n'drop .prg files into the emulator. No floppy support yet unfortunately! I've put up some stuff here (mostly recent demo scene demos, it's mixed with other systems though): https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/ https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/ The Snapshot menu is just for storing and restoring emulator snapshots (e.g. the current state of the emulator, mostly useful for debugging)
- supportengineer 3y agoWhere were all these resources 30 years ago?
- rasz 3y agoFrom what I remember from Adrian's Digital Basement or maybe Jan Beta YT channel similar guides used to be available in print form back in the day.
- ge96 3y agoThis could be a drinking game, pull a random image, guess what the error is...
- rzzzt 3y agoIt's the PLA, what did I win?
- 300bps 3y agoEasily 90%+ of the faults on Commodore 64s, especially the early models. My Christmas 1982 model died with a faulty PLA well within the warranty period.
- snvzz 3y agoTrue story: PLA, VIC-II survived, 6510 and SID died. The real takeaway: Do not ever use CBM's C64 PSU. Get a modern one; they're all safe.
- MenhirMike 3y ago> Do not ever use CBM's C64 PSU. Get a modern one; they're all safe. A thousand times this! The C64's PSU is a pretty awful voltage regulator that badly creates two voltages (5V DC and 9V AC, so even two different types), and only gets worse with age, to the point that it overshoots the 5V DC by so much that it fries the chips.
- 300bps 3y agoOne of the most rewarding things I have done in the past few years is learned component-level repair on Commodore 64s. Take a dead 64 showing nothing but a black screen, try the dead test cartridge, follow its lead or start desoldering, socketing and replacing chips. And suddenly you have a working forty year old Commodore 64.
- snvzz 3y agoDefinitely. I fixed our two C64s that had been stored broken for 30+ years. Black screen to full working condition. Last time I had seen them working I was about 5 years old. Very satisfying and nostalgic.
- wkjagt 3y agoDo you remember what the failures were? What did you end up replacing?
- snvzz 3y agoBlack screen both. Removed SIDs as they are unneeded for boot. Some RAM chips were getting hot, so I socketed and replaced these. No progress otherwise, so I got myself a dead test cartridge. One of the C64s had video capture card blink the screen on power on, the other not even that. From this I correctly guessed dead VIC-II. Moving the working one to the other machine made that machine show the memory error blinks from the test cartridge. Swapping the other PLA finally allowed the memory test to end, and the display to show up. I also had to replace a 74-series logic chip in one of the RAM rows, not sure which computer, do not remember how I figured that out. A color SRAM was also bad. The remaining machine, I found that 6510 clock output was missing, from which I deduced dead 6510, which a swap confirmed. Oh, and one of the two sids caused errors, so I had to replace that too.
- wkjagt 3y agoOh wow, seems like you encountered all the possible problems! Good thing you had two C64 so you could swap components. Do you have an idea why so many things had failed? Bad power supply blowing up chips maybe?