Tynemouth Software: Commodore 8032 Mainboard Repair

This is an old post, preserved for reference.

The products and services mentioned within are no longer available.

Another 8032 board in for repair. I seem to be doing quite a few of those at the moment. They never fail to disappoint in the range of weird ailments. It's the traditional black screen, no beep, a generally dead computer. The owner has previously attempted to get this running, replacing four of the ROMs with 2532 EPROMs, and replacing the four 2114 video RAM chips.

There were a few suspicious looking solder joints, but these boards can be difficult to work on, so that is understandable. Usual first tests, power, reset, clock all came out OK, although the reset pulse was a bit slow, three or four seconds, it's normally a second or so. So time for the ROM/RAM replacement board.

With the ROM/RAM board in place and set to replace the onboard ROM and RAM the system booted. Checking individually, there was a fault in the RAM, and with the RAM replaced, the onboard ROM would beep, but not show anything on the screen. This usually means the kernal is getting somewhere, but not far enough along to start BASIC. The other issue was the screen.

Quite a nice pattern, but that's not much use. Looking closer, it appeared the text was being displayed, but the right hand half of each character was a solid block. You can just make out the 31743 bytes free and ready prompts.

The 80 column video circuit on the Pet is quite complex, and there is a lot of odd / even split, and it uses pairs of 2114 SRAM which are 4 bits wide each to give the 8 bit character. It's very tempting to start looking at all the odd and even bytes parts, and the buffers that only affect half of the byte. The section outlined in red is the video circuitry, and most parts of it operate on only odd or only even, or on half bytes.

But you have to stop and think about the Pet. It has no pixel graphics capability. All of the above things are working at the character level, so when they go wrong, you don't get half a 'b' in 'bytes', you get half of the bits that make up the character code for 'b' (0x42), so it won't be a 'b' at all, but 0xF2 or 0x4F if the bits are stuck on, 0x02 and 0x40 if they are off. That isn't what is happening, it's actually in the pixel that make up the 'b', and that narrows it down to only two candidates, the two chips on the left of that red box, the character ROM and the 74166 shift register.

Testing that was easy. I removed the character ROM, and I still saw half blocks on the screen, so the culprit was the shift register. This takes a line of the bitmap of the character from the character ROM and sends it out to the screen a pixel at a time. Replacing that and the display was restored.

Well, I say restored, there were a few random characters, usually @ symbols on the screen. This seemed to get worse when the screen was scrolled. This is a simple test program that is meant to alternate \ and / characters to make up a random maze, but the more it scrolls, the more @ symbols appear.

I went to a simpler test program:

10 PRINT ".";
20 GOTO 10

This produced a screen half full of dots as expected by also a random collection of letter n's.

Here '.' is 0x2E in PETSCII and n is 0x4E, and on the boot screen, @ is 0x00 and it should be space (0x20). It looked like one particular bit was wrong in the value being fed to the character ROM, so it could have been the input buffers or output latches or the 138 that does the timing not pulsing the write for long enough. But, it did look like it was the video RAM. It could have just been one bad bit on one RAM chip, but there were some n's that were on the alternate characters (i.e. .n.n.n.n would mean just the odd or the even, ..nn.. would mean both). I replaced all the video SRAM with good chips, and it was fine. The 2114 that had been replaced passed memory tests, but I think were just a bit slow to cope with rapid screen fills. With the video RAM replaced, and the screen was back to how it should be.

Now I could get on with the rest of the testing. Memory tests showed one faulty 4116, so I replaced that with a similar spare. This time I soldered it in place, as these MOSTEK ones all seem to have short legs and it didn't sit well in a socket. You'd hardly know it was there.

The ROMs were still not able to boot. I tried a full set of known working 2532 EPROMs, and got the same result, so I tested for continuity and found a few bad connections. I decided the best approach was to removed and replace all the ROM sockets.

The tracks underneath were in good condition, and all continuity tests passed with no sockets, so I installed a new set of sockets and tested with a set of known working ROMs. That worked, so I want back to the set of 2532's that came with the board, and they all worked as well. With those labelled up, it was back in business, running on it's own ROM and RAM.

Further testing showed no response from the IEEE-488 port with one of my pet microSD disk drives plugged in, and no response from either tape. Oh, and it is still slow to reset. Tape 1 came back after cleaning the connector, I've found the best way with those is to re-tin them with fresh solder, and then wick most of it back off with solder braid.

I cleaned all of the connectors and but still no tape 2 or IEEE-488. The IEEE-488 connector is gold plated, so I didn't want to tin that, I checked for continuity, and all the connections were going through.

I used the debug output from the pet microSD to check what was coming through, and it was getting a request, but the handshaking wasn't working. I could see the name of the file I had tried to load, so the data lines looked OK. That rules out one 6520 and two of the MC3446's. The one chip that does handshaking and tape 2 is the 6522. I removed and socked that and installed a new 6522 and that brought back the IEEE-488 port and tape two.

So that's it pretty much sorted, other than the slow reset. I had noticed some of the capacitors were in a poor state, including the one on the 555 that generates the reset signal. I don't normally replace the capacitors on Pet boards unless they appear damaged, or are not preforming properly. In this case it was both, the covering was shrunk and split on several of them, that usually means they have got rather hot at some point. I went though and replaced all the electrolytics, bar the large one, as that seemed OK and is difficult to get one with the right lead spacing.