Subj : IIgs
To   : Anyone
From : Spectre
Date : Sun Oct 08 2023 05:46:00

This is kinda long story...

A few years back I found an old AWA 14" LCD TV with SCART in a local thrifty
store. I duly got to manufacturing the appropriate cable from the GS to the
SCART socket. Worked like a charm, had the best looking image I'd seen since
the original GS monitor which has a horrible tendency to fail, and I don't
have one. Unfortunately, it got its screen destroyed :/ Ethnic cleansing in a
cramped unit, poor balance and to much pain relief don't mix well.

So for the last... 18-24months I've been hanging out waiting for another
similar TV to come past.  Unfortunately they seem to be fairly rare here, I
gave up recently and shelled out for a cheapo SCART to component video
converter dongle.

Yesterday I got the GS out, cleared some desk space for it, and applied the
power... only to be met by a sequence of events that kind baffled me.  It
doesn't want to bong at startup, the video is only showing an initial display
and becomes locked there, and doesn't want to respond to the keyboard.

I broke out the multimeter and checked the battery, woefully low, sporting
~1v.  So reefed it out, replaced its alkaline cells and tried again.  Next I
reefed the cards out, not much to speak of, a RAM card and a MicroDriveTurbo.
No change.

I also ended up swapping the keyboard out, and in the end broke out a
composite monitor.  Usually a last resort because the image is so poor
compared to the RGB output.  So the composite video is stable, is the GS or
the dongle messing with the RGB?  No way to test, actually there might be,
the dongle also has VGA out but thats for another day now.

Not sure what was going on, I reseated everything I could, not many sockets,
mostly surface mount so between the motherboard, and cards not much to do.
Bopped it back together.  Seems to be either a corrupt CF card on the micro
drive, or a bad memory problem. It ended partially booting GS/OS and saying
its missing some file.

Unfortunately I don't have the space to leave it out unassembled, really need
to install more bench space out here, so I've had to pack it back up and pop
it onto the back burner again.

Spec


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