Can I hazard a simpler guess?
Clean the cartrige port? Seems to me if it's dirty or something is shorting
a pin someplace in it it could be triggering the cartrige sense even when
there is no cartrige in it. Which would give you a system trying to come up
with no roms.
OK - So it might not be strange to those experts in Commodore hardware, so
I hope one of them reads this!
This was one of the few missing things in my CBM collection until yesterday.
The system first appeared dead, showing just a blank screen. But then it
worked fine with any of my assorted game cartridges in the cartridge slot.
To test the disk drive, I pulled out a cartridge-based spreadsheet which had
load and save commands and the disk drive worked OK.
The big surprise was when I put in the Simons Basic cartridge and this heavy
old "portable" C64 came up with its normal opening screen "SX-64
Basic" etc
and it loaded and ran a variety of programs from disk without a problem. But
without a cartridge, or with a C64 Super Expander cartridge, just a blank
screen.
Could it be a RAM chip that is faulty, with Simons Basic causing some
relocation of memory that allowed the system to work? Unfortunately, the
insides are not nearly as easy to get at compared to a standard C64.
[I'm assuming this is somewhat similar to a C64]
My first guess is that it's partial failure of the BASIC ROM. The Kernal
is probably OK (since it can run from cartridge, run the disk drive,
etc). Since, I suspect, Simons BASIC uses some of the routines in the
BASIC ROM, I guess the ROM is partially OK, and that it's being selected
correctly by the PLA.
But if the initialisation code in the BASIC ROM was damaged, it'd not run
BASIC if no cartridge was installed. Simons BASIC probably doesn't use
this code.
Second guess : The Kernal ROM is partially defective -- in particular the
part that calls the BASIC ROM if no cartridge is installed.
-tony
--
Jim Strickland
jim(a)DIESPAMMERSCUMcalico.litterbox.com
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