T-Jay's C64 Blog

A Board, A Cart, A PSU

An update on the board. I purchased a diagnostic cartridge and harness from CECE-Mods on eBay, as I wanted to ensure that there was nothing else wrong with the board. I used the cartridge and harness to see what was wrong, and on first look, there looked like there was A LOT wrong on the board. OK, so my next idea was to get a working board and send the other one to get repaired.

So the board came, plugged the cartridge and harness to it – same result! This made me think that I have now blown up two boards! I went online to see what voltage the Cassette port and SID chip SHOULD get, and it looked like it might be the PSU (thanks to Lemon64’s forum). I will point out that this was an aftermarket PSU, NOT an original so I was hoping that the PSU died, and this was simply going to be me buying loads of things to rule out everything. 

It was the PSU. I did not kill any boards; I did killl a SID chip in the process (I bent the pins right off), so although I did this the expensive way round, I am going to buy a keyboard, case and PSU, so that WHEN something like this happens again I will be able to rule things out a lot better!

Who knew you could kill half of a power supply unit just by putting it into storage!