13 Jul
1997
13 Jul
'97
11:46 a.m.
On Sun, 13 Jul 1997, Zane H. Healy wrote:
My main question is on the C= 128, along with all the
other stuff I picked
up, I got a Commodore 1702 monitor, and a couple 1541 drives. I've got the
drive attached, and the monitor hooked up via a RF cable (I guess that's
what it's called) through the front connection (This works for the Amiga
500 I also got yesterday). Anyway, I power the thing on, it "buzzes" the
drive like it's expecting to find something, and I don't get anything on
the display.
Sounds like the ever so common Dead Commie Syndrome.
I remember that the C64's like the VIC-20 would
drop you at the prompt even
if you had nothing attached, and didn't need any kind of boot floppies. Do
I need some kind of boot disk for this beast?
Nope. It's probably just dead.
The next question would be, is it worth trying to
repair a C64's power
supply? I got two of them yesterday, both powersupplies are dead. It
Nope. It's another ailment called Dead Commie Power Supply Syndrome.
Quite common.
looks like the 5V line is shorted to ground. I did
get a copy of the Old &
New style users manuals, and a copy of "Troubleshooting and Repairing your
Commodore 64" yesterday (I love Powells Technical Books!) so I've got some
documentation. It's been too many years since I worked as an Electrician,
so my skill level is pretty low (wasn't very high to begin with, which is
why I switched to computers).
Do this: go out and search for 10. This will give you a large enough
sample group. If you're lucky, 5 of the 10 will work. Throw the 5 that
don't work out. Keep the other 4 working ones around so that when the
first fails (it will, give it 2 days) you have 4 other spares. Expect to
find 20% of your 4 spares spontaneously dead. All these statistics have
been formulated in a recent study (conducted 40 seconds ago) based on
real-life data.
Sam
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