6 Sep
2016
6 Sep
'16
1:58 p.m.
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Fred Cisin
Sent: Tuesday, September 6, 2016 11:36 AM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Subject: Re: SWTPC 6800 weirdness
On Tue, 6 Sep 2016, Brad H wrote:
My 6800 has been mostly working, but it seems to be
occasionally
flaking out. I don't know why. Sometimes you go to power it up, and
there's no response on terminal side. The 'fix' is sometimes to
wiggle the memory/CPU boards and then for some reason it's fine(ish).
There are five cards
fix by wiggling implies a bad connection.
possibly due to oxidation or corrosion of connector?
Depending on how vigorous the wiggling is, it could even be bad connection
between a chip and socket, or even tiny damage to a trace on the board.
Today it flaked again and would not come back up, so I
pulled the MP-M
board and the MP-A board and swapped slots. It came up, but memory at
$0100 was
missing. I tried powering up, swapping slots, etc..
same deal. Then I
left the machine for an hour, powered up again.. boom.. now $0100 is back.
Working later could be a thermal problem, or just
random chance.
There is definitely some oxidation around the board and on some pins, which
I thought I cleaned well enough on the particular slots I'm using. I'll
check again. It seems odd that mechanical fooling around makes it work.
Could be totally coincidental though. I've been a bit hesitant about taking
the board out as I worry about fragility.. but I think we're past that now.