cwathen
Experienced Member
So my newly acquired C128 has it's first intermittent problem. It has a sticky power switch which I've not yet got around to fixing which has caused it to rapidly pulse on and off before finding the sweet spot where the switch makes good contact (now I don't touch the switch but turn it off and off at the wall). I'm not sure if it's caused some damage somewhere as it now has an intermittent boot fault.
Sometimes when powered up it fails to boot with a black screen. My TV switches to an S-Video signal when powered on or off so there clearly some sort of video output coming out of the machine. Power cycling the machine does nothing, then after a few minutes of trying the fault seems to clear and it will boot. Once up and running it's stable. However the problem seems to be getting steadily worse.
Oddly, whilst this behaviour is happening the reset button still responds and you can always boot into C64 mode with either a cartridge in the cartridge port or by holding down the Commodore key. That being the case, the Z80 still seems to be functioning properly in order to enable C64 mode, and the 8502 along with all other key hardware on the computer must still be functioning too.
Any ideas? Possible a dodgy RAM chip in the extra 64K?
Sometimes when powered up it fails to boot with a black screen. My TV switches to an S-Video signal when powered on or off so there clearly some sort of video output coming out of the machine. Power cycling the machine does nothing, then after a few minutes of trying the fault seems to clear and it will boot. Once up and running it's stable. However the problem seems to be getting steadily worse.
Oddly, whilst this behaviour is happening the reset button still responds and you can always boot into C64 mode with either a cartridge in the cartridge port or by holding down the Commodore key. That being the case, the Z80 still seems to be functioning properly in order to enable C64 mode, and the 8502 along with all other key hardware on the computer must still be functioning too.
Any ideas? Possible a dodgy RAM chip in the extra 64K?