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Commodore 64 works after 10 years sitting outside

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Bud:
The guy goes speechless as totally rusty Commodore comes alive after 10 years in the field  :-+

Ampera:
Big, chunky trace computers with mostly through-hole components, and a rock solid design tend to be incredibly resilient to all sorts of havoc, and also incredibly easy to repair, unlike modern computers where there are thousands of traces, and thousands of fragile surface mount components, the damaging of any one of which could definitely result in the board being broken, and difficult to repair without the right experience or tools.

Kleinstein:
The C64 was to cheap to use tantalum caps  :-DD
It also was a time before low ESR caps got popular so it was from before the time of the early short shelf life low ESR caps.
Another point is no lead free solder and mask ROM - so no EEPROM to loose it's content.

There still is a chance the power-supply might fail if stared. So I would first run the supply on it's own and check the voltage (AFAIR its only 5 V regulated + some 9 V AC).

It is odd the C64 was in storage for only 10 years - I haven't used it for more like 20-25 years.

I would not call the design rock solid - the signal supposedly contained quite some glitches, so that using fast chips for the logic could be a problem. The RESTORE key was dodgy from the beginning (needed to hit it hard to make it "work" by bouncing enough), but rarely used.  Arguably this was a feature and not a bug.

Ampera:
This wasn't 10 years in storage, this was 10 years outside. I don't even think it had a power supply with it.

I'm saying the manufacturing technology is very chunky compared to modern systems. I have motherboards from 2004 that have absolutely no signs of any issue whatsoever, look pristine, but just don't work in the slightest, and I bet you nothing consumer made in the last 14 years could survive this easily.

Alex Eisenhut:

--- Quote from: Kleinstein on October 13, 2018, 09:43:01 am ---

I would not call the design rock solid - the signal supposedly contained quite some glitches, so that using fast chips for the logic could be a problem. The RESTORE key was dodgy from the beginning (needed to hit it hard to make it "work" by bouncing enough), but rarely used.  Arguably this was a feature and not a bug.

--- End quote ---

1) Like any two-layer design.
2) http://www.breadbox64.com/blog/c64-restore-mod/

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