13 Jul
2006
13 Jul
'06
3:42 p.m.
Just in case there are any!
I picked up our first blue-faced PET 2001 last night (we've got a couple of
the black-faced ones already), but it's cosmetically in a bit of a state after
living in someone's garage for years.
I know almost nothing about these machines - are there any particular gotchas
about restoring them (like, "don't touch this bit as all the paint will fall
There are 2 silly failure points on old PETs. One is the IC sockets,
which were of pretty poor quality (I replace them with turned-pin on any
machine I intend to run). The second is the power connector to the
mainboard. It links to the trandformer and the smoothing caps mounted
separately in the case, and is somewhat under-rated. It goes
high-resistance and overheats (the white plastic housing turns brown).
You want to check and maybe replace this
What's software availability like? Any archives of
tape data on the 'net
anywhere? (Diags would be great, games would be fun later on :-)
If you have the first release of the ROMS (BASIC 1?) then there's
diagnostics in the ROM. It was replaced by a machine code monitor in
later versions. But you need a couple of test connectors (one goes in the
user port, the other in place of the keyboard cable) to use them. A
friend of mine has them (and a BASIC 1 PET), I can try to ask for details.
-tony