exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Great news on the Beeb front.

With regards to the A5000... Could well be marginal RAM.

I guess there aren't any bootable diag ROMs which do a proper march test are there?

stephen_usher wrote: 02 Dec 2024 17:25 Great news on the Beeb front.

With regards to the A5000... Could well be marginal RAM.

I guess there aren't any bootable diag ROMs which do a proper march test are there?

Indeed it is :)

Not that I know of, but I haven't really looked. There may well be. I will take a look.

Well, with the A5000 in the sick bay, here is it's replacement:


I can say with some certainty that setting up the Ethernet adapter was considerably easier on this than it was on the A5000!

Since the picture came out a bit dark, it's a Performa 6200 running a Power PC CPU.

At work we had a few of these. Basically all the admin staff had one each. Not bad machines and probably the first PowerPC machines which seemed an upgrade from the m68k ones to be honest.

stephen_usher wrote: 03 Dec 2024 12:10 At work we had a few of these. Basically all the admin staff had one each. Not bad machines and probably the first PowerPC machines which seemed an upgrade from the m68k ones to be honest.

Aside from the self distructing PSU, now replaced, my only other complaint is that some of the plastics go super brittle, otherwise not too bad at all.

OK, so the recently upgraded Beeb decided to do this today, literally as soon as the 3d spaceship starts loading on the intro screen:


Luckily I was able to repair it quite quickly by replacing a 74LS245 at IC14. TBH I didn't do a lot of troubleshooting, firstly removing the Sideways board, then swapping the CPU out with no change, however since I knew there were some LS245 & LS244's in the RAM circuit and I had spares, I swapped them out one at a time and when I got to IC 14, all was well once I swapped it.

I dropped the Sideways board back in and it's all been running fine for about the last 40 minutes, and since it failed immediately before I'm confident it's good. It's also running fine with the Sideways RAM enhanced version of Elite too.

The 245 tests fine in my TL866, however I suppose it could be marginal in the BBC or the act of swapping it out cleaned the contacts. Phew!

Any links re that enhanced version of Elite?

Just wondering how that compares to the second processor version I used to play BITD... :roll:

JezC wrote: 06 Dec 2024 11:23 Any links re that enhanced version of Elite?

Just wondering how that compares to the second processor version I used to play BITD... :roll:

It's an SSD image, you'll need to remove .txt from then end.

I blame the Thargoid invasion of Sol for the 245 misbehaving.

stephen_usher wrote: 06 Dec 2024 13:05 I blame the Thargoid invasion of Sol for the 245 misbehaving.

:lol:

You're quite possibly correct :)