30 Apr
2009
30 Apr
'09
7:50 p.m.
On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 3:36 PM, Mr Ian Primus <ian_primus at yahoo.com> wrote:
--- On Thu, 4/30/09, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
Perhaps you have to buy those new, I do not. I have hundreds of 16-pin
and 20-pin sockets from leftover stock from my COMBOARD days. I
haven't had to buy any of those in 15 years. I also have tubes of NOS
chips, also from COMBOARD stocks. My thought was that modifying the
chips might make it difficult to test them later in my automated chip
tester. I could, of course, modify one chip and see if it still
tested good.
Oh... and I _don't_ have XT clone boards lying around. I didn't get
into Intel commodity hardware until 1992. I jumped right into 386s
As for a socket mod, how does this sound? ...
Take a 16-pin machined-pin socket.... ?Take another
16-pin machined-pin socket....
Sounds like it would work perfectly. The only issue I would have
with it is that the two machine pin sockets you would need cost
more than the 4164's do, and you have to purchase those sockets
new - whereas you can scavenge 4164's from junked XT clone boards. :) from the Commodore world.
Yeah, and 41256's are much harder to get - I just
brought it up as a just-in-case. I once spent an afternoon using a propane torch to
scavenge soldered-in 41256's from scrap HP printer boards in an attempt to upgrade a
Sun VME machine.
I use a heat gun, not a torch, but I am quite familiar with the process.
In many instances, it's actually easier to modify
the board to take 4164's than it is to modify the chips or build adapters. But, again,
that's not very original, and involves hacking the board.
I was contemplating that technique for the PET 4016 board. I have to
hack the board anyway to patch around the 6mm holes punched at the
factory.
It really depends on your application, and how the
board you're installing them in is set up. Do whatever works best for you and the
particular machine you are repairing. But you can definitely, replace 4116's with
4164's with minor modifcations and expect it to work just fine.
Thanks for describing the specifics. I'm sure this discussion will
come in handy since I have a very small amount of 4116s and a lifetime
supply of 4164s already lying around.
-ethan