per
Veteran Member
I got a NTSC C64 now, but it has certain problems.
When powered on, it sometimes sets up a frame, sometimes not, but in most cases it will fill the display with random symbols and characters before either going to black screen or lock itself in some loop where the screen flickers between two sets of characters. The nature of this is pretty random, and it is even affected if I hold my finger briefely on the CPU or the ROM closest to the CPU.
Now, I do got a PAL C64 of the same motherboard revision, but almost all chips in that one are soldered. The NTSC unit has sockets but I don't want to risk desoldering components on the PAL unit.
This far only the VIC-II has been tested and found good. May this be one of the ROMs failing?
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And here's one little bit of trivia. One of the previous owners of this machine ran it from European 220V AC mains, with the live line connected in series between the C64 and the disk drive. I'm speechless. That won't get you 110V on both devices.
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More testing. SID is missing quite a bit of voices (only one sawtooth voice heard in the title screen of "Alien"). Testing other games confirms that only one single voice works.
When powered on, it sometimes sets up a frame, sometimes not, but in most cases it will fill the display with random symbols and characters before either going to black screen or lock itself in some loop where the screen flickers between two sets of characters. The nature of this is pretty random, and it is even affected if I hold my finger briefely on the CPU or the ROM closest to the CPU.
Now, I do got a PAL C64 of the same motherboard revision, but almost all chips in that one are soldered. The NTSC unit has sockets but I don't want to risk desoldering components on the PAL unit.
This far only the VIC-II has been tested and found good. May this be one of the ROMs failing?
-------------------------------------------
And here's one little bit of trivia. One of the previous owners of this machine ran it from European 220V AC mains, with the live line connected in series between the C64 and the disk drive. I'm speechless. That won't get you 110V on both devices.
-------------------------------------------
More testing. SID is missing quite a bit of voices (only one sawtooth voice heard in the title screen of "Alien"). Testing other games confirms that only one single voice works.
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