On Wed, 11 Dec 2002, Tony Duell wrote:
Chip swapping can only be of use if you _know_ all the
chips you're
swapping in are good..
Sure, but chances are it will work.
I've not repaired many C64s, but I was under the impression that the
82S100 PLA was a common failure. If that's failed in both the 'to be
repaired' machine and the 'parts' machine, you're not going to get
anywhere.
The PLA is the most common chip to fail on a Commodore 64.
The most common thing to fail in the whole C64 setup is the black power
bricks, which are generally considered a piece of garbage.
I'm currently in the process of repairing a SX-64 from a donor C64, and
have managed to get the machine "working" - but there's a break in the
Luma/Chroma lines to the CRT pack.
However the first issue WAS a bad PLA.
Resources I used, aside from a couple C= geeks I know:
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/cbm
In particular, in my case:
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/cbm/documents/repair/troubleshooting-c64.txt
funet.fi has schematics, software, ROM dumps, everything.
JP