C64 G - Black screen :(

I got my hands on a C64 G, a nice and beautiful one. Warranty seal was untouched so I had high hopes when I turned it on... then nothing happened.

Ok, that's bad.
I quickly plugged in another PSU and voila, the machine was... almost alive.
Black screen, nothing else.

That means, I had to remove the warranty seal and check what's going on inside the C64.
The memory chips were heating up very quickly, so it seemed obvious they were defective.

Others were fine, no presence of overheating so I thought the solution will be simple.
I started to search for replacement chips and sockets immediately.

Ordered a pack of sockets (sidenote: it's much cheaper if you order 20+ pieces than order only 2...) and finally found XX464 memory chips as well for a good price. So, I removed the defective chips and soldered the sockets.

And...
After memory replacement it still doesn't work :(
Black screen.
So I have to dig deeper and find out what might be the problem.

I even tried to touch the G-spot but didn't help :(
 

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Today's music: X Marks The Spot - 64k Intro by Portal Process

Lemon. aka. "Winners don't use AGA"

I've met with the Amiga somewhere around 1993 where one of the guys in the youth hostel showed us some great demoscene productions on his A500. Since that point I had the good ol' C64 and we used 386 PC's at school. The difference between the PC and Amiga was remarkable. The graphics, the audio, the games... everything was just... simply wow.

More than 20 years later I bought an A500. It was just about time.

The machine is a bit yellowed but who cares, I'm gonna retr0bright the sh*t out of it. The fl0ppy disk is broken, it doesn't load anything just gives a "corrupted floppy disk" error message. Whatever, I might gonna invest into a Gotek drive later. I have an Amiga 500! :)

However, the most important part is the 512kbyte memory expansion. These expansions usually as old as the Amiga itself and the mounted battery starts to leak. Badly.

After some research I found that this is normal, as these batteries weren't made for eternity, obviously. If you are lucky then the acid doesn't eat the circuit - and I was lucky.

The leak wasn't _that_ bad, it was just _bad_. Removed the expansion, it was stuck a bit bit I used the force (pun not intended). And desoldered the leaking battery and removed the infected chip as well.

The chip looks like a dead bug but actually it's not dead, just resting. The battery however, is dead.

Side-note: if you have a closer look on the photos you should realize 3 of the 4 similar chips are in a mount but the 4th is not. It's soldered into the panel without a mount. Why?

Anyway, the next step was to clean the panel and the infected areas. What would you use to remove acid?

LEMON! Really. This has something to do with chemistry, pH and acid and alkali stuff, whatever. I don't know about the exact background of it but I gave it a try and used some real lemon juice to clean the panel.

Cut a lemon to half, squeeze the juice out of it into a bowl, stick an earbud into it then pour a lot of lemon drips into the panel, cover all the acid-areas with the juice. You can hear a bit of sizzling noise, this means the lemon fights with the acid. And the lemon will win, you can be sure.

Leave them fight for an hour, then clean the panel with water, let it dry out for some days and voila.

Actually, I was double-lucky this time because the acid didn't melt deeper into the panel and cleaning was simple, there was not necessary to do some electronic soldering work.

Coming up next: cleaning a slightly yellowed A500 and fix the broken floppy drive.



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Today's music: Rink A Dink Redux by LEMON. (A500 demo)

Super Nintendo - From Yellow to Reborn

Sooooo, it took around 2 weeks to clean a SNES and it could have been shorter if we had sunny days... instead of natural UV light I had to use a UV light bulb which is not that efficient. Other than this the procedure was kinda the same as with the C64. Basically this is the short version of the SNES Story.

Longer version:
I was happy when I received the special screwdrivers and finally was able to dismount the SNES.
Everything started with a dirty-dusty, yellowed machine:

As I already mentioned in a previous post, it was fairly easy to clean the cartridge slot with earbuds and compressed air, so the SNES was in a good working condition but the plastic was, well, just look at the photo...

Disassembly is easy if you have the right tools:

However, I still don't understand why it was necessary to use 2 different type of screws (check previous post).

Surprisingly, the interior wasn't that dusty as I expected. A slight push of the compressed air bottle and a soft brush touch did the job well.

And then... no sunshine for days... what a sad week was that. I mounted the UV light to the slot, moved my bed from the bedroom to the kitchen and put the cardboard box into the bedroom.

For a few days only.
Then a bit more...

Cardboard box and aluminium foil interior, it helps to reflect the UV light to EVERYWHERE.

Switch on the UV light:

And we wait.

Still wait.

Even more...

After 6-7 days I was fed up with this procedure and cleaned the plastic parts from the cream, using a lot of warm temperature water in the bathtub.
Result:

After reassembly:

And... what is that..? Oh, no, again...

A leftover screw...
I have no idea where it belongs. Really. There were no empty slots, no holes, nothing. All I can think of this screw belongs to another device. Hopefully.

But at least the SNES works fine, I played with many games since I cleaned it.

Conclusion:

• SNES disassembling is easy
• UV light bulb s*cks. Should use natural UV light or a lot more powerful bulb.
• Clean the plastic after 2 days and re-apply the cream again to achieve more even whitening
• SNES parts are a bit harder to reassemble, it has more parts and it's a bit more complicated inside than a C64
•  SNES is fun. SNES is a robust machine.
• Aluminium foil is great, it reflects the UV light and spreads it everywhere.

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Today's slightly annoying music: Pac-Man DX soundtrack
 

Amiga mouse

There were some pictures about an Amiga mouse in the previous post(s), now it's time to share the complete story.

I received the mouse with an Amiga 500, the seller mentioned yellowed parts and a partly-broken mouse. Well, it looked like I'm going to have some fun with using H2O2 again and practice with soldering some electronics. You can guess, I don't have photos about the original condition of the mouse...

Anyway, I connected the A500 to the tv and *boom* the magic boot screen appeared immediately and the Amiga loaded Workbench from a floppy disk in a minute. That was quite painless so far.

I had a testrun with the mouse to check its condition, well, the buttons were unstable and their clicking sounded broken. As an additional defect the left mouse button didn't work.

I was thinking, would an old but still working PC mouse be a good replacement? Let's ask the internet.
This was the best answer to my question, thanks to a user called Aidan on a random forum:

"Basically the problem is that a PC mouse has all the smarts inside. An Amiga mouse has all the smarts in the Amiga, and the mouse is dumb. You can either build the interface listed, or try and extract the quadrature signals from the mouse and push them down to the amiga."

Okay, then I need new knobs, and after a quick search I found them at AmigaKit.

 C64 C motherboard, Amiga mouse board, 2 C64 power switch and 2 mouse replacement buttons 

I used a basic 40W Weller and a desoldering pump to remove the broken buttons. As this part contains relatively small amount of tin the part were removed quickly and clean. The next picture shows and empty slot and the already inserted new button:

This one shows the replaced buttons together with the old stuff:

Almost ready:

Clean mouse case, right after 3 days of H2O2 and UV light treatment:

I had to cheat a bit with the case because the new buttons are higher and stiffer than the originals and the mouse case became too tight. Used a small plastic piece, cut from the external part of a cable, glued them to the bottom part. Looks like somebody is mad, right? :)

This was just enough to lift the upper part a bit and the buttons can *click*.

There is a small crack on the left button but overall the mouse is nice, clean, white and everything functions as it should. This is the last photo, taken right after reassembly:

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Today's music: Amiga demoscene compilation

Super Nintendo - part 1.

I was happy for the SNES, it's a beautiful and massive console, built for eternity. And it came with Street Fighter 2! One of the games I loved when I was a kid, we spent our pocket money in the arcade with friends, playing it all day long.

My favourite character is Guille, you can guess why. Yes, it's because of Jean Claude van Damme.

While the Street Fighter movie wasn't really great I still liked it because of the characters.

Sidenote: the first Mortal Kombat movie is awesome, don't try to convince me that it s*cks.

So, here is this SNES with 5 games, let's switch it on. Oh, wait. I don't have cable to connect with TV.

AV cable ordered. Now we wait.

Cable arrived! We happy, Vincent.

First, it looked like... "no games today...":

Thanks to Jay @ArgysAttic and his instructions, I was able to quickfix it:

While the SNES is nearly unbreakable, looks like it is very sensitive to dust, even if the cartridge and slot look clean. They need a bit more cleaning than I expected and using earbuds and compressed air helped.

Now I can enjoy some good ol' games until the special screwdriver set arrives and I can disassemble the SNES for a deeper cleaning.


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Today's music: Mortal Kombat soundtrack