Pet Rescue
Experienced Member
It's taken a long time but I've finally bagged a P500! :happy2:
The good news is that she has her original box and even clear plastic bag with commodore printed on it and poly's
There's always a but! and it's she has the black screen of death!!
After checking voltages there is +12V,-12v,+5v and +2.5v from the power supply.
I decide to check the 6509 first and there was a clock and reset but the address lines were high apart from A11,A12 & A13 so were the data registers D0-d7.
I took the plunge and used my 710 to test the 6509 cpu in it and low and behold it was u/s.
I then took the working 6509 cpu from the 710 and put it in the P500 and up came the boot screen. Happy days!!
Well not exacty, upon typing the keys were intermittent and upon investigation some of the pins had slipped up inside the keyboard connector.
I must point out at this point if you pressed enter you got the syntax error message when returning after typing rubbish as expected.
After pushing the pins back into the connector properly and reseating it, all of the keys worked. Happy Days!!
No again it was too good to be true. After typing the mandatory ' 10 ?"Hello World" ' test program after pressing enter the computer locks up!
In fact just pressing enter alone locks the computer up, press reset and the ready prompt comes back.
I'm a bit worried about the 6509 cpu getting damaged especially as they are getting few and far between.
It's stumping me as to what could cause this kind of fault (Kernal? PLA? Memory?)
Have you had a similar problem
A couple of questions for P500 owners:
1. Does the pi symbol work on your keyboard or does a checkered pattern appear instead of the pi symbol
2. Do you get the odd artifacts flicker on the screen a bit like the 64 sparkle bug
P.S Just noticed that typing garbage sometimes returns a syntax error but not always.
When it locks of some typed characters sparkle. (jiggle about!)
The good news is that she has her original box and even clear plastic bag with commodore printed on it and poly's
There's always a but! and it's she has the black screen of death!!
After checking voltages there is +12V,-12v,+5v and +2.5v from the power supply.
I decide to check the 6509 first and there was a clock and reset but the address lines were high apart from A11,A12 & A13 so were the data registers D0-d7.
I took the plunge and used my 710 to test the 6509 cpu in it and low and behold it was u/s.
I then took the working 6509 cpu from the 710 and put it in the P500 and up came the boot screen. Happy days!!
Well not exacty, upon typing the keys were intermittent and upon investigation some of the pins had slipped up inside the keyboard connector.
I must point out at this point if you pressed enter you got the syntax error message when returning after typing rubbish as expected.
After pushing the pins back into the connector properly and reseating it, all of the keys worked. Happy Days!!
No again it was too good to be true. After typing the mandatory ' 10 ?"Hello World" ' test program after pressing enter the computer locks up!
In fact just pressing enter alone locks the computer up, press reset and the ready prompt comes back.
I'm a bit worried about the 6509 cpu getting damaged especially as they are getting few and far between.
It's stumping me as to what could cause this kind of fault (Kernal? PLA? Memory?)
Have you had a similar problem
A couple of questions for P500 owners:
1. Does the pi symbol work on your keyboard or does a checkered pattern appear instead of the pi symbol
2. Do you get the odd artifacts flicker on the screen a bit like the 64 sparkle bug
P.S Just noticed that typing garbage sometimes returns a syntax error but not always.
When it locks of some typed characters sparkle. (jiggle about!)
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