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Tandy 1000 RL/HD RAM address fault

ElSupremo

New Member
Joined
Jul 16, 2019
Messages
8
Hello,

I recently purchased a 1000 RL/HD on Craigslist. It displayed colorful, flashing characters on boot when I bought it, but after a second or two, booted into Deskmate or DOS like normal. Now, though, it never makes it past the flashing characters. I get a beep code of 4, 3, 1, which Google tells me may indicate a RAM address failure. Is this an issue with the RAM itself, or with the ROM? Where do I start with addressing this?

I'm attaching a picture of the fun screen I get to enjoy.
tandy_error.jpg
 
Oh dear, that's what I was afraid of. I was really hoping there was going to be another solution. What troubleshooting is possible that doesn't involve replacing chips? In the picture below, are the KM14C464J-10 chips the RAM? I've searched online for them in the past, and wasn't able to find any for what I would consider a reasonable price.
my tandy mobo.jpg
 
Does anyone have any advice regarding how to troubleshoot this RAM. It appears to be surface mount, so I don't think the ol' piggyback method will be possible without soldering each pin. Is there some other way to test the chips?
 
Piggyback does indeed work if the RAM is soldered in. Another thing you can do is power it up and then feel each of the chips to see if one or more of them is hotter than the others.
 
Picking this up a year later. I was unable to determine which RAM chips were bad, so I bought NOS ones on eBay and had a local computer repair place replace them all for me. Unfortunately, it didn't fix the computer. Something else is preventing the computer from accessing its memory. I'm going to poke around with my multimeter to see if the power supply is good or if I'm dealing with dirty power or something. Does anyone have any idea if anything else might be causing the issue? Watching CuriousMarc fix his HP 9825 with memory issues has made me want to try to tackle this project again.
 
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