Leaderboard

This tech has been on hold since last year as a project for this year. As if I needed more work. An interesting tech, all built into a frame case with plug in circuit boards. With each new tech a tester has to be built otherwise it's almost impossible to check everything. This time I'm building a hybrid one to test Black Box as well so the old adage of killing two birds with one tester is apt. Anyway down to the nitty gritty. The main issue with these boards is the CPU card as corrosion is rife from the onboard battery. Luckily it doesn't spread to the rest, certainly not in the few examples I've seen so far. So starting with the board on the bench it looked like this... First thing is to strip off 'all' the old components. Sounds easy but it took nearly two days to get all the bits out as most of the solder had gone grey and crumbly. All the connector pins were green so they had to come off too. Fingers crossed the CPU is OK but you can see it has a sort of 'rainbow' effect on the top and in my experience that is usually caused by it overheating! Unfortunately with jobs like this some solder joints just won't let go of their component and what's left of the via and pad comes off with it. I wouldn't even attempt working on a board like this without my rivet kit! With new rivets in, a good clean up and application of solder mask it was time to put the new bits in. I had to add a small piece of copper to the battery track as it had eaten through on the top side. I made a deliberate mistake above. Don't worry I corrected it later. Nearly all done. Sort out a new set of chips barring the RAM and CPU. I'll keep my fingers crossed they work otherwise it's going to get expensive. The only bits I'm short of is the two mica caps that tune the crystal and the 7442 chip which I didn't have in stock. Hopefully they should arrive in a couple of days. Knowing what I know now I don't think I'll be taking on any more corroded CPU cards as this one has taken the best part of three days! Oh, I forgot I've got another one to do.

Hi Everyone Following on from Snappy Viper My friend Bernard Mitchell has created another game for his ZX Spectrum which is,Super Line Up mpu3. In a similar fashion to Snappy,it has some robotic style sounds which mimmick some of my catchphrases lol. Here is his latest video. And hope you can get to watch it. He would love to hear any feedback if you leave comments for him. I must admit,I like this a lot. His next project is Chances Unlimited. Thanks Massive to Bernard who visited me a few weeks ago and is a genuinely nice chap who is into this stuff. This video and Snappy can be seen on his YouTube channel

That's good to know as they are pretty rare beasts. I don't know the in's and out's of this tech, probably 80's but I'm sure someone will chip in if you'll excuse the pun.

8035 CPUs can be scavenged from old Electrocoin credit boards if needs be.

Here is an updated version of Ploggy's excellent Reel Bonus layout that contains the rotating disc assembly that I created just for this machine and afaik has not been used anywhere else. A lot of work for just one machine but it was worth it. Enjoy Reel_Bonus_1600_DX.rar

wow great to see you here enjoy your stay

Kiss my arse.