Recent content by bozimmerman

Hello all, I have a C128DCR that won't boot cartridges. I'm trying a known working C128 Dead Test Cart, so it's ironic. When I boot with the cartridge, it either boots to garbage, or to a normal screen, but goes immediately into the ML monitor, breaking at A8023A (or there-abouts). My first...

Yes, there is a full screen of garbage, but it happens for less than a second, and usually while the monitor is doing a vertical sync dance. It's very very easy to miss. I've seen pets that give you a big proud garbage screen to stare at for a second before going to READY. This one zips by so...

These things perplex me. There's one in a computer I use often which started whining really loud, so I began doing what I usually do when I don't have spares -- swap with the best one I have from a less-used computer, and add it to the list of things to repair/tinker-on. In this case, the swap...

Hello all, I'm working on fixing a PET 3008 which was obviously upgraded by hand to 4.0 roms and 32k. The symptom is a typical one -- garbage on the screen, although it's interesting to note that this failure is a recent one; this particular PET was a member of my PETting Zoo, which means I...

Hello all, I'm not an expert on olde PCs, so please bear with me. I have two old 386s. One works fine, has a couple of floppy drives, and a hard drive, and it's happy, but it's a 386sx, so its best isn't great. The other is a 386dx with a math coprocessor and a tower case. So cool! It too...

This is the strangest thing I've ever seen. It came with a load of junk I picked up. Attached to this message is a picture. It's a 16 bit ISA card, with ~ 1mb of ram in thirty-six 41256 ram chips, an AMD 80286 processor, a nasty busted little 3v battery, a pair of Pheonix BIOS chips on...