Some Commie questions

From: Sam Ismail <dastar_at_crl.com>
Date: Sun Jul 13 18:46:24 1997

On Sun, 13 Jul 1997, Zane H. Healy wrote:

> My main question is on the C= 128, along with all the other stuff I picked
> up, I got a Commodore 1702 monitor, and a couple 1541 drives. I've got the
> drive attached, and the monitor hooked up via a RF cable (I guess that's
> what it's called) through the front connection (This works for the Amiga
> 500 I also got yesterday). Anyway, I power the thing on, it "buzzes" the
> drive like it's expecting to find something, and I don't get anything on
> the display.

Sounds like the ever so common Dead Commie Syndrome.

> I remember that the C64's like the VIC-20 would drop you at the prompt even
> if you had nothing attached, and didn't need any kind of boot floppies. Do
> I need some kind of boot disk for this beast?

Nope. It's probably just dead.

> The next question would be, is it worth trying to repair a C64's power
> supply? I got two of them yesterday, both powersupplies are dead. It

Nope. It's another ailment called Dead Commie Power Supply Syndrome.
Quite common.

> looks like the 5V line is shorted to ground. I did get a copy of the Old &
> New style users manuals, and a copy of "Troubleshooting and Repairing your
> Commodore 64" yesterday (I love Powells Technical Books!) so I've got some
> documentation. It's been too many years since I worked as an Electrician,
> so my skill level is pretty low (wasn't very high to begin with, which is
> why I switched to computers).

Do this: go out and search for 10. This will give you a large enough
sample group. If you're lucky, 5 of the 10 will work. Throw the 5 that
don't work out. Keep the other 4 working ones around so that when the
first fails (it will, give it 2 days) you have 4 other spares. Expect to
find 20% of your 4 spares spontaneously dead. All these statistics have
been formulated in a recent study (conducted 40 seconds ago) based on
real-life data.

Sam
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Received on Sun Jul 13 1997 - 18:46:24 BST