Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!wuarchive!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!olivea!oliveb!felix!reynolds From: reynolds@felix.UUCP (David Lee Reynolds) Newsgroups: comp.sys.cbm Subject: Re: My C64 is dead Message-ID: <151154@felix.UUCP> Date: 13 Sep 90 15:05:14 GMT References: <1990Sep10.144605.16326@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> Reply-To: reynolds@felix.UUCP (David Lee Reynolds) Organization: FileNet Corp., Costa Mesa, CA Lines: 30 In article <1990Sep10.144605.16326@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> ghfeil@white.toronto.edu (Georg Feil) writes: >In its last moments of life, the machine started randomly accessing the >early portions of screen memory, and the foreground colors were alternating >rapidly. There were most likely other affected memory areas, but these were >obviously not visible. After about 5 seconds of this, the machine crashed. >I cycled the power, and it rebooted (made it to startup screen) but the >foreground colors were still going wild. It crashed again almost immediately. >Future attempts to restart were not successful (screen stayed black). > >Any ideas out there? In the past I worked as a repair rep for a local Commodore repair depot. If I were the one to work on this unit the first thing I would try is the PLA (Programable Logic Array). This one chip controls ALL memory and display accesses. The odds are great that this is the culprit. I would go as far to say that out of every 10 C-64's I fixed 9 had this chip bad. They can be purchased from many sources for about $10 to $15 bucks. If you need a source just email me. If you have a friend with a C-64, you might want to swap these parts first, (the PLA's are almost always socketed), to verify that it will fix it! >Thanks, >Georg. >-- Good Luck! David Lee Reynolds (legs,spsd,zardoz,hplabs)!felix!reynolds