Recent content by muse

You're lucky. They aren't guaranteed to work after sitting around for decades. Any Commodore/MOS manufactured chip ( PLA, MOS 74 series chips and unfortunately the SID chip ) were prone to corroding internally over time due an imbalance between phosphorous and boron used when manufacturing...

Gary Kildall was the guy behind CP/M. Unfortunately, he passed away during the 90s in an accident.

You read and hear all kinds of things on the Web, the c64 community can be quite toxic at times and theres definitely a lot of negativity and hate directed at Christian Simpson aka Perifractic. People are complaining that they are using DB9 pcb mount for joystick ports instead of the original...

The breadbin design actually helps with typing because you have more space to anchor your wrists. The wedge cases made that harder IMO.

The C64 Ultimate uses Gateron Pro 3.0 switches, definitely not your Alps. The Alps found in Apple keyboards have a very distinct acoustic character when pressed. I’m convinced it comes from the higher grade plastics absorbing and shaping the sound, something I can clearly hear on my SE/30 and...

Its a pierce style oscillator if i remember correctly One side connects to the inverter input (high impedance, sine like), the other to the output (lower impedance, distorted or clipped). Different bias, loading, and phase. In your screenshot, one pic shows a perfecr sine wave. Other leg...

Those gold top Motorola PGA packages are fairly robust. Ive never come across a bad one yet or seen one fail, but to be fair I was predominately an Amiga user where cheaper variants were used except on expensive accelerator boards which I could not even afford anyway :) Dead machines can hide...

The scope is the right tool. I also can't see a problem with the waveforms you took, its normal to see some noise in those readings especially at 1v divisions where the jitter is more pronounced. The comparison shot appears to be sampled using 2v divisions, noise is still present but isnt...

He has a lot of patience. Can't appreciate enough how long it took him to record and then do the editing, mixing. :)

What are the address lines doing from the 68030 ?, if they are stuck high then that could confirm your suspicions on a bad reset circuit. You'd want to confirm that the signal is reaching the CPU by probing the 68030's rst and halt line inputs, these are active low signals. So it should toggle...

The fluid/electrolyte is conductive. So its a good idea to clean it first before replacing the old capacitors with any new ones.

@JDW It looks tempting but I already have 3 original units. Maybe I should just bite the bullet and justify it by saying that the chips in my current units will die someday :)

I can see why cap kits can be very convenient but I am cheap, they are usually a bit more expensive because the hand picking is done for you. So I tend to order enough parts for several jobs so I can claim the free shipping. I did initially order the wrong sized capacitors on the primary side...

I've bought brand new caps that were bad or off spec, its obviousky very rare but it has happened to me at least once when I replacing a few electrolytics in a vertical deflection circuit which resulted in the image being too far down the screen. I'm not buying cap kits though, normally...