Hi folks,
I just dug my old Osborne OCC1 (1st model, in the beige vacuum-formed ABS
case), only to find all is not well. Actually, "finding" all is not well is
a bit of a white lie - I already knew it was in trouble, from when I last
tried to boot it about 2 years ago...
Unfortunately, the intervening 2 years have failed to fix the problem, which
is that the video seems to have no horizontal hold.
It took a few goes, but eventually it booted from a CP/M disk; with
scrambled video. The links below are to a picture & two versions of the same
video (16 seconds of special-effects laden trickery...):
PIC: The startup screen in scrambled fashion:
http://www.solutionengineer.com/ozzie/occ1_prb.jpg
VID: Booting to CP/M:
MOV format (4mb):
http://www.solutionengineer.com/ozzie/occ1_prb.mov
MPEG2 format (9mb):
http://www.solutionengineer.com/ozzie/occ1_prb.mpg
Please excuse the camera wobble on the movie... The constant high-pitch
whine is, I think, the image stabiliser in my camera working away.
Now.... If I pull the termination block off the External Video connector,
the screen goes out (as one would expect); push it back on & the screen
comes back on with the display as steady as a rock -- unfortunately, it's
crashed the computer... From this, I deduce that it must be something in the
mainboard electronics that's failed (a cap, maybe?), rather than something
in the monitor unit.
Any ideas where to start looking? I have an oscilloscope (albeit I've
forgotten how to use it, and am not 100% sure where the probes are), and a
multimeter... beyond that, not a lot.
I've tried cleaning the contacts to the monitor, and around the Ext Vid.
termination block; and I've wiggled the three cable connectors to the
mainboard a few times to clean them up. I've also popped each of the three
socketed chips in & out a couple of time to clean the legs up. Finally, I
soldered the contrast knob back together - one of the legs had broken.
Basically, everything works except for the shaky video. Sometimes you see a
whole page full of 1s, or 0s; essentially, it's all a bit random. Bad
connection somewhere, perhaps, or maybe a failing chip?
Cheers!
Ade.
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG.
Version: 7.5.524 / Virus Database: 269.23.16/1431 - Release Date: 13/05/2008
19:55