New update in the saga. Unless some new revelation come up, I'm ready to throw the towel.
A friend of mine has an 8250 that was working years ago. So I thought it would be very useful to have a working one side by side to compare what's going on and potentially replace ICs. Great.
I get it, fire it up and... black screen and light on the keyboard always on, just like my faulty one! Weird, but just about anything can cause that. I open it up, start looking around: voltages fine, clock signals fine, data lines fine... /CAS on the system RAM, always high. Just like mine!!!!
So what's going on? Is there some magic to make these computers work and I need to do something more than just pressing the POWER button?? Or are these computers designed in such a way that when anything fails, they always end up having the same symptoms?
Seriously! I even started wondering whether I had to had the keyboard plugged in for example since for most tests I had it unplugged. But no, that wasn't it.
Oh, and just to make sure I'm not being a total idiot, I did try the composite out and the RF out with the same results. So it's not just a matter of my SCART cable being bad :-)
Actually, there is something in common between the two MSX2s: the keyboard. My friend just gave me the main unit to test figuring I already had a keyboard. Maybe I have a killer keyboard from hell :-)
