Help is it zx8301 failure?

[mhanias]

Th QL with gold card plus ICE while working well running a heavy program (molecular graphics) Suddenly freezes .

After reboot the screen is like the attachment photo. Is the zx8301 faulty?

Mike

[bwinkel67]

Did you try and boot without ICE and Gold Card to see if you get the same screen. If so, try to re-seat all of your chips that are socketed. If that all fails then it's likely a bad IC.

[dex]

ZX8301 aparently is doing something (generating picture).
Very probably it is not faulty.

[mhanias]

Dex you are right. The problem is with gold card. What can I do ?
Ιs there anyone to repair the gold card?

Thank you and Happy new Year

Mike

[XorA]

Dex you are right. The problem is with gold card. What can I do ?
Ιs there anyone to repair the gold card?

Thank you and Happy new Year

Mike

Picture looks like what Ive seen with RAM fault outside 128K, so try re-seating that ram on GC.

[mhanias]

Thank you very much Xor. I re-seat the AR chip and move a little the ram chips ()they need desoldering) and the Gold Card came back to life.

A promising new start for the new year.

However is there any repair center for gold and trump card etc?

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi

I usually remove all the QL, Super/Gold Card plugin chips and clean the legs with a pencil eraser and clean with IPA and tootnrush, I also try to clean the sockets, which maybe okay but it does harm to give them a once over.

Probably the removing and reaseating of the chips is doing the most corrective action.

If you use a Gold Card or Super Gold Card, remove the 68008 CPU this is notused and dtill consumes power, which can sometimes stop the QL from booting up.

I do no know of any dervice centres for QL computers or acvesdories maybe there are one or two amateur engineers who like to repair or setvice QL computers.

The main problem with the Super/Gold Card is the Ingot Chip which is an old Altera PLD, which when programmed can not be erased, newer Altera PLDs do not seem to work.

Yettoid knows more about this topic.