Fixing two C64 motherboards with hot chips
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 31 ธ.ค. 2021
- #troubleshooting #repair #c64 #8bitdanceparty
It's been quite a while since I've done some C64 repairs, so let's tackle two motherboards with the ultra common black screen.
--- Video Links
Lab bench PC upgrade to a Dell T1700 Workstation:
• Let's upgrade my lab P...
OLED screen for Retro Chip Tester Pro:
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Adrian's Digital Basement ][ (Second Channel)
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-- Tools
Deoxit D5:
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O-Ring Pick Set: (I use these to lift chips off boards)
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Elenco Electronics LP-560 Logic Probe:
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Hakko FR301 Desoldering Iron:
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Rigol DS1054Z Four Channel Oscilloscope:
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Head Worn Magnifying Goggles / Dual Lens Flip-In Head Magnifier:
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TL866II Plus Chip Tester and EPROM programmer: (The MiniPro)
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TS100 Soldering Iron:
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EEVBlog 121GW Multimeter:
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DSLogic Basic Logic Analyzer:
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Magnetic Screw Holder:
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Universal ZIP sockets: (clones, used on my ZIF-64 test machine)
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RetroTink 2X Upconverter: (to hook up something like a C64 to HDMI)
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Plato (Clone) Side Cutters: (order five)
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Heat Sinks:
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--- Links
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--- Instructional videos
My video on damage-free chip removal:
• How to remove chips wi...
--- Music
Intro music and other tracks by:
Nathan Divino
@itsnathandivino - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
It's only a matter of time until Adrian gets his hands on a thermal camera. 😁
Predatorvision!™️
Northridgefix uses a thermal camera for black screen/no power on failures where he has detected an unexpected short to ground. He then provides a much smaller power input current than normal while testing and looks for the hot chip. Usually turns out to be mosfets on modern equipment.
It’s only a matter of time until I start to repair c64 for friends. Because of these videos haha
@@vjcodec just how many friends with faulty C64s have you got? ;)
Imagine if they'd known in the eighties that in 35 years middle aged men would sit and repair the C64:s for fun, and broadcast it to thousands of other middle aged men that just sit and watch them do it.
What a time to be alive! :)
Happy new year, Adrian!
I just realized I am middle aged. Not even mad :D
Oh well - I had a blast as a teenager, but I'm kind of glad that's over now :P (Yay stability!)
@@the_kombinator And now we are able to buy all the stuff we dreamed of then. And more! Yay! 🥳
@@falksweden True - at my peak in high school, I had 5 cars at one time (trust me, all were shitboxes, not even gonna flex) and now I have 6!
...some are still shitboxes lol.
@@falksweden Oh, and a basement full of 80s-90s PCs. I think I may even work on my 286 later today, and live stream it :D
I too am a weird nerd being entertained by other weird nerds on the internet :D
Solder mask wrinkling is because the board is hot roller tinned before the soldermask is applied, and when it goes through the wave soldering the solder tends to wick under the solder mask creating the wrinkles. Yes common on those age boards and with the soldermask and wave soldering.
I had always wondered about that, thanks for the description!
One way to stop this happening was to not flood the planes with solid copper but to partially fill them with a cross-hatch pattern of tracks.
That's why PCBs all use solder mask over bare copper (SMOBC) nowadays. Only the exposed copper gets further processing like ENIG, etc
Also, not using solid copper planes help to stop the PCB from warping during wave soldering, especially if the copper planes were not balanced on both sides.
Thanks, I always wondered myself. I've seen it in older home theater amplifiers too.
My cat loves these repair videos and will sit and watch the entire thing even if it's an hour long. I think she appreciates the locked camera and the vaguely ASMR sort of element, but she particularly likes the continuity testing.
Why do cats do this? it's werid
Nice)
Strange she's didn't go nuts with that SID test - lol -.
I want to see a video of your cat comparing the SID filters
@@br33ch i don't think my cat cares about anything
I love how Adrian considers a near 40 minute video to be a "mini" repair-a-thon. Keep them coming!
Wow! That OLED screen is a massive improvement, especially on camera.
I just love the C64 repairs, it's like a murder mystery, you can always try to guess what's wrong at home until you find it! It's exciting! Happy new year Adrian!
The wrinkled solder mask on the bottom is from the "wave soldering" system. The board literally passes over a flowing fountain of molten solder and that solders all the through hole components at the same time. I used to run one of those machines in the olden times. Had a really funky smell from the rosin in the solder.
The solder just gets onto the underlying copper traces, under the mask and bubbles the mask up.
Totally normal.
Cheers and have a good new year now o/
I wonder if the people servicing commodores in their day ever had anything like the diagnostic tools you have today. That chip tester is pretty impressive
32:00 - Old reject SID chips were sold as new on eBay and other chip suppliers in the early 2000s, the chips had nothing wrong with the voices but the filters were all bad. You probably have one of those chips. Many early games and demos barely used the SID filters so some people never realized they had a bad replacement chip, plus with how much the SID sound varies chip to chip some folk thought it was normal until it started getting documented in c64 forums.
I don't think it's that. I just think the cut off is just different. One of the reasons people often prefer the 6581 over the 8580 is the filter can start to distort and that's used in some 6581 tunes. There is no "normal" with the SID, the filter performance is all over the shop. If the filter was used on a track then your ability to hear it as intended is all about how close your filter curve is to that of the composer.
How about trying out different values for the external filter caps? Maybe that could make the filters sound more "normal"?
35:18 Yes, I love watching electronics repair videos like this even though I myself have no experience with the C64. Keep 'em coming!
I could watch Commodore repair videos non-stop...keep'em coming! -Mark.
You could. There's so many that need repair because so many were sold.
All I can say is I love the C64 repair-a-thons. Really good troubleshooting technique and the actual repairs are really good. I’ve used your desolder/heat gun technique twice now and no damage to vias or lands. Works great.
Thanks for the great video!! And using the RCT to check/verify is excellent. Love these videos!
As several people have pointed out is application of tin over the backside of the board before solder masking was applied. Back in “the day”, again, for RFI reasons, large copper planes were used to minimize noise. Mandates from the US government were relatively new so we used the belt and suspenders approach. As we learned more about RFI and specifically what caused it, a properly designed circuit board optimized to avoid RFI was more effective than “dump a lot of solder over it and hope for the best”. Also, in the day, when the trace masks were layed down on the PCB, it was plated with tin. That resulted in fewer defects because the acids that etch away the copper sometimes would eat through the etch resist especially if the chemicals weren’t quite right. This would not happen as only the copper would be removed when the plated tin was used as the resist. I was designing printed circuit boards just at the time a LOT of new technologies in PCB production were invented. Retired now but it was a wild time back then. I was learning alongside the engineers sorting this stuff out. Fun times.
Hot chips are good! As long as you have a tasty beverage to go along!
Yeah, and if they're smothered in hot nacho cheese they are even better.
Tang!
@@cheapasstech Perhaps with vodka which is also very useful to clean your solders.
@@francoisleveille409 I repaired a liquid damaged tv mainboard with vodka once!
@@cheapasstech Flux remover is too expensive and doesn't taste good.
anytime i get to see adrian dance to his party, always makes it a good day. thanks for putting a smile on my face! great work as always
Adrian has his chefs hat on. Kicking the chips up a notch. Bam! :)
Happy New Year, Adrian.
Regarding the RF shield, it really is a good idea to put it back on after you're done (you don't need to solder down every singe tab). Yes, many things are more resilient to RF noise nowadays, but old machines like the C64 can put out a _lot_ more noise across a much broader spectrum than things like modern switching power supplies do, and can still produce significant interference for many types of devices. Because everything is digital now, the interference usually isn't as obvious, but that actually sometimes makes the situation worse and harder to actually diagnose. In the analog days, if you were getting interference from something like a C64, you would hear it as noises, or see it as picture artifacts, etc. Nowadays, you'll just get digital devices randomly not working sometimes, or randomly cutting in and out, or significantly reduced range on your RF devices than you should have, or reduced WiFi speed, etc, with no idea what's actually causing it (unless you go around and test turning on and off everything in the area to find out what the culprit is).
*RF shielding does still matter.* Arguably even more nowadays than it used to, it's just often less obvious how much it actually does matter nowadays because the resulting problems are often more subtle, annoying, and hard to troubleshoot.
The new screen for the chip tester looks amazing!
Ah, that's what it is! I was wondering about that screen since the last appearance, it looked a lot nicer than the regular yellow on black LCDs
Thanks for your awesome support for the C64 and the SID chip, Adrian 😀 I also knew something was up with that SID as soon as the tune started coming out!
Perhaps we could say, your unWAVering support for the SID does not oscillate. It's like 5 volts DC. 🤣
All repairs are useful to watch Adrian, very educational. Thank you.
That bad sid sounds really good in the test. Broken, but good. A song composed specifically for that sid could sound amazing.
Happy New Year, Adrian. You're my favorite vintage resto guy when it comes to computers. Glad to see you rescue another couple of classics.
Great new years first repairs video!
Hot chips in flux sauce.. 😂
Nice, that diagnostic and repair was so quick and no major or rare chips was involved.. 👍
Happy new 2022 Year!
I had an 80's flashback when you were getting into the music. I really enjoy the information you provide. Have a safe and happy 2022.
I'm loving this new thing about being disappointed when I get a TH-cam notification... Because I've already seen it because I'm a proud Patreon supporter! I'm sure I'll rewatch some.
Happy New Year!
Happy new year Adrian from the UK. I love watching C64 repairs, brings back such nostalgia. I could never the courage to solder or repair anything, that's why I am amazed at your videos. I really wish I had your skills. Thanks.
There's only one thing to do! Get yourself a solder iron and start soldering. It's not that hard. Big Clive has some really good videos on the subject.
Have been follwing you for about little over a year now and tho I dont know all that much about digital electronics I really enjoy your videos. I had an Amiga 6oo and I loved it to death. Keep up the good work, much love from Sweden.
I agree, even if I don't have a high interest in what is being fixed, I do enjoy watching the troubleshooting.
Back in mid-late '80s I worked on C64s. We had a dead test diagnostic cartridge that had an LED matrix that would show which chips it detected as bad. It didn't require much to be populated on the board. I think all it needed was the graphics chip (probably for clock) and CPU.
Love these c64 repair videos! Keep em coming!
I wanted to say thank you, you taught me how to troubleshoot most if not all of my retro machines.
Being 27 and into retro computers makes it difficult for me to learn from anyone around me, but your videos have taught me a lot.
Just got my rev1 A500 running again. I look forward to learning more and playing on these retro machines.
I love c64 repair videos, you made my first day in 2022 a happy one!
These repair videos are always entertaining and educational. Keep them coming.
I could watch these videos all day. Seriously! Nice work sir, rock on!
"The art of troubleshooting is still fun to watch." because you make it fun to watch. :)
It's also great to see these classic machines brought back to life.
The 8-bit dance party reminds me of Genesis's The firth of fifth from Selling England by the pound: I could never record it correctly on 4 tracks, it only sounds good when you listen to it on the original vinyl! And congrats on getting your /// channel back, you got a new subscriber, if that means anything!
Nice dual camera setup ! Great work as always
Yay! Two more C-64s back in service!
The art of troubleshooting is such a fun thing to watch. I hope you keep doing these.
Watching Adrian fix c64s, better than a good movie😁 Heck, I could watch this all day! Thanks!
Happy New year @Adrian, thank you for all you do!
4:45 My favorite part of any video it's in!
These are so fun to watch, the fixing of the old C64...way cool. Up here in WA north of ya, looking to find an old 128 at some garage sale or ebay to go with my old 1571 that I got back in high school that I still have! Rock on, love the videos!!
Awesome!! Love this repair videos. Good Job Adrian
Happy New Year, Adrian.
Thanks for all ya do!
LLAP
When repairing any old computer make sure to install Sockets on the microchips you replaced so that it can easily be replaced if it fails again
your a venerable Rossmann of the 80's era love the videos!
So glad to see my favorite computer back on the bench again!
Good tips though especially checking for hot chips that are shorted. Thanks for sharing. Happy New year
The great thing about electronics from the 1980s is how durable, repairable, and long lasting they can be.
always enjoying a C64 troubleshooting video
Excellent video! Thank you!
I LOVE C64 REPAIR VIDEOS!
absolutely superb video!!! so much good tech info on here!!! and so much fun !!!👍😉
Yep, brings me back to the good old days 1984/5-ish when I worked for an Authorized Commodore Repair Center... I quickly learned to identify bad chips using my finger... sizzle sizzle... Yep that's the bad one! LOL. Most of the time it was a bad RAM chip. Although I have a memorable bad SID chip, when I pressed down on it then it started working correctly, took my finger off of the chip and it went back to making funny click click sounds. Quickly I determined that it was actually the single-wipe socket. I tried to determine if the chip had a bent leg or if the socket had a bad metal contact... after reseating the chip the problem was not resolved. Eventually I gave up and the repair to this board was to solder the SID down on the board directly because I didn't have any of those sized sockets... sorry if that makes someone mad to hear, but the shop didn't stock sockets for that kind of repair and the board was already taking a long time to find and troubleshoot the issue... Customers were demanding their C64's get repaired ASAP and I had still had a stack of C64's to get through... so it passed QA testing and on to the next.... Anyway, Adrian... Happy New Year and Cheers!
@4:36 OH MY GOD! Someone get help! Call an ambulance!
.... Oh wait, It's Adrian dancing?
Uhhh...OK, nevermind about the ambulance then.
I never got my hands on a C64 or C64c before the prices shot up. I've learned so much by watching/listening to these repair videos. The excitement is pretty contagious when solutions are found. My dad got a C128D back in the late 90s by accident from an office sale and so that was my xmas present that year. Thankfully it hasn't had any problems really, while I love the traditional wedge/all-in-one design of micros the 128D is a great machine IMO.
I have kept a collection of Apple II's though, a standard //e, //e Platinum with the numpad no IIGS upgrade, //e Platinum with the IIGS upgrade kit installed, and a IIGS Woz edition that's been mine since ~96 that was fully upgraded with accelerator and other cards for a printing house. Also, a small pile of 5.25 disk drives and 2 3.5 disk drives for the two IIGS.
haha! kick ass!!! Happy New Year!!
I loved the Kermit arm-waving dance party! Go Adrian!
I definitely enjoy these videos - keep 'em coming!
The ZIF-64 is my favorite frequent guest star. I think it should get a "featuring the ZIF-64" card after Nathan Divino's credit.
Happy New Year Adrian!
Nice dance moves Adrian Happy New Year
At first I didn't understand your love for Eight-Bit Dance Party, but I think I get it now: it's a great tune to test SID Chips. (And... everytime I see the acronym SID, I think of Space Intruder Detector from the old seventies show UFO...)
Hearing that tune sound as it should makes you happy because it means the SID is working as it should.
Thanks 🙏🏽- love the c64 videos…
You are right. Such videos are really entertaining and an easy way to "collect" experience on how things can go wrong in a machine. I mainly fix 8bit Ataris and 16bit Amigas but I can say that after watching all those repair videos I am sure that I know more about C64s then the machines I usually work on ....lol
Happy New Year Adrian! I see you have a strong c64 fan base on this channel.... over 2k likes on this video! 😁👍
happy new year Adrian!!!
New camera vid quality is looking awesome.
Regarding the reliability problems with MOS chips, you might be interested in a recent video from what appears to be a Vintage Computer Forum event. It's called "Life at Commodore (Act II) - Bill Herd". He explained that MOS reverse engineered the 82S100 PLA chip.
Elsewhere (or possibly the same video) I watched a video where it was said that MOS had a problem with boron contamination of the passivation layer, which caused chips to fail early in their life.
I'm an Atari fanboy, however I really enjoy your videos on the C64 computers, and colour me impressed with your fault finding abilities. Thank you for sharing your expertise and knowledge.
I am going to be addicted on NTSC-"DanceParty" Music :)
I had an Assy 250469 recently with broken ram that didn't like a Samsung RAM chip like the one you installed on the one in the video. The machine did start but didn't want to run stable. I though I had a bad of bad chips for a while, but after multile chip swaps, investigation turned out it was the board. It took me a while to find the cause and was timing related. Installing a 15pF capacitor between the RAS line and ground did solve the problem.
Gee, what's Adrian up to this weekend? Oh! He's repairing C=64s! I've never seen him do that before!
🤣🤣🤣🤣
I just got my first Commodore 64 from eBay and it had never been opened, I could tell because the screws had that distinctive crack as I took them out the first time and it was perfect inside. I was honestly kind of disappointed because I wanted something to fix. 🤣
I did end up replacing the 7805 regulator because the chips were getting 5.96 volts and that seemed a little high.
It definitely does, especially considering it's a volt more than the power supply ought to be providing. Now I wonder if a failed regulator is partially responsible for why an over-volting power supply can be so disastrous.
@@stevethepocket yeah I knew the old regulators were not as efficient as even the cheap ones we can get today and over time they definitely can go bad so I always keep some on hand for old electronics like that.
Thank you so much for your videos and showing your trouble shooting process. Im just waiting for delivery of a c64 with drive that i bought, no idea if it works and no power supply, so fingers crossed else ill be breaking out the scope!
Back in 1984 my C64 came up with a black screen. When I dissembled it the only thing obvious was the RF Shield solder joints were broken. After I re-solder it everything was fine and it worked great several more years until I replaced it with a C128D. Never really figured out why that fixed it; maybe something with the ground connection I accidently fixed at the same time.
Every time you mention the FCC, I immediately think about the "FCC song" from "Family Guy". The song seems quite apropos.
To enjoy your own work is so awesome.
These Videos are so motivational to fix something yourself. So I did at least bend CPU and Jumper pins back for the whole duration of the video.
New SID, even through TH-cam can heard the difference.
The origonally had a shield over the board with tabs that would touch the hotter ICs and was used as a heatsink..I spent about 10 years repairing these and other Commodore products.
The hybrid desoldering gun/hot air method for removing DIP chips does actually work pretty well, I've tried it!
The only thing I want to flag about it is that it can result in the chip having some residual blobs of solder on the legs that make it difficult to then put that chip in a socket. If you can deal with that, that's fine.
If your desoldering gun is in good condition and you use the right technique, you should be able to get *all* of the solder out of the joint with just the gun. This is really the ideal way to do it but it can be a pain sometimes and if you're in a hurry the hot air method is fine--just gotta be careful because if solder is on the edge of molten you can easily end up pulling on the pads or through hole plating .
I think it might be a different story if you're working on game consoles rather than old desktop computers, because I think game consoles were typically built more cheaply and often this means phenolic/paper PCB substrate, which is not as sturdy as fiberglass.
Who managed to out-cheap Commodore? That’s quite a feat! 😄
@@nickwallette6201 I've not looked inside of a Commodore machine myself, but I'd be surprised if any home computer were as cheaply built as the Mega Drive/Genesis.
@@rfmerrill Wait, huh? What's wrong with the Genesis? I have one on my workbench taken apart. Doesn't strike me as too different from anything else of that era. I mean, it's no Dreamcast... :-)
Would be interesting to see a audio waveform when testing those SID chips
16:59 ... The board was soldered by wave soldering. The bottom of the board (the one that has the solder joints) face the wave and probably the intense heat and the use of flux made the solder mark to look like crap. It is not the copper, just the mask. Some soldering machines use a flux wave BEFORE the soldering wave. You can see the fumes and flux crunching noises as board poases over the wave.
I think the "funny sounding" SID is an original R1 since it doesn't have a revision number, and ISTR your ZIF standard is an R4. I have an R1 SID that has similar filter characteristics, and there are a number of songs (Ben Daglish tunes come to mind) where the bass sounds are completely sucked out on it. It was originally in my longboard 64 which stopped working when I was in college, and the 64C that I got to replace it has a newer SID (R3?) that sounds as expected.
I’ve watched Adrian repair so many C64s, I’ve become an expert in C64s and I’ve never touched one.
22:30 Sattinger’s Law.
Hey Adrian! Nice work. Please remember that old PCBs don't like heat air treatment - it can provide irreversible damage.
Hi Adrain, Love your videos as always but hoping you can perhaps do a introductory series to repairing electronics / diagnosing faults as your more knowledgeable than a lot of us Noob's and i don't always follow your logic in how you repair your circuits. Sometimes its the jargon or how to use the oscilloscope or perhaps basic knowledge on ic function which you perhaps assume we all know. So , I think, a series covering oscilloscope use, component function and explanation on why its needed. Eg Caps are basically small battery's, as i understand it, that charge up and provide a constant voltage ? to reduce 'noise' or fluctuation in voltage ? But WHY ? its the simple stuff that trips a lot of us up , stuff that you likely know and don't think about and don't tell us !
Happy new year 🦖
RF shielding is there for a reason. The RF spectrum is a shared resource and you're pissing in the community pool.
I find it kinda funny that it had the RF shield on the bottom but not the enclosure around the oscillator circuitry.
Happy New year!
I NEVER ever want to see or touch another C64 product in my life, I have had enough of repairing the damn things to last a lifetime in my first job, never want to see another one.
He ask If we like his videos? Was that a real question 😂 oh boy i do. Always makes my evening better when that Bell shows a New video is online.
Btw. His tester is crisp to look at now, compared to The Stock lcd it came with. A much better solution.
Missed the Ketchup for the chips Adrian.
Happy New Year
Nah, gravy and cheese curds.
Happy new year.
Keep it up, thanks for sharing the video :)
Troubleshooting vid, thumbs up. Troubleshooting C64, two thumbs up!