Cosmic_Starlight: the picture of your board still shows one tantalum capacitor for the crystal oscillator, replace it with a ceramic 22pF (picofarad) capacitor, exactly same one as you bought at the store and is installed in the other spot for the crystal.
thats what they guy at the store i bought the replacements told me but at the same time you can see yt videos of ppl buying this exact same with with the same capacitors and theirs work fine
These kits don't come with any tantalum capacitors. They are all multi-layer ceramics, so they should work without issue. The boards have a serious issue with the way it's laid out though: There is very little space between traces under some components, making it very trivial to just short out a transistor and not even notice. My advice would be to just go from trace to trace with a multimeter in continuity mode... you may not see it with the naked eye, but there may be a short somewhere!
thats whats most perplexing for me, i had just bought these very thin and sharp like a needle dmm test leads and i made doubly sure that there were no continuity between any two contiguous transistor or ic leads and there were none, and even the point of the leads could pass trough the sodler pads of the transistors no problem but it seems two s9012 are shorted or were defective from factory
but one of them if i put the negative lead on the collector (its pin 3 right ? the rightmost one when the flat part is towards you) and the positive on the emiter it will show continuity or it was the other way around (positive on collector and negative on emiter) this was T1
The BJT driven by PD6 should be an NPN (S9014) and the one driven by the encoder's push button too. The BJT switching the battery power is a PNP (S9012). The designators in the schematic posted by snapper are T1 (driven by PD6), T2 (driven by push button), and T3 (battery power). The NPNs can be replaced with any jellybean small signal NPN. And the PNP also, but its hFE needs to be about 300 or higher.
i dont know what to do, at the present time am fighting the AE seller for a refund or a partial refund at least.
i could try and go downtown again and just buy replacements for all the transistors and ICs but:
A. i dont know if i could get those exact same ones
B. if i cant get the exact replacements what should i replace them with ? like what specs should the ICs and transistors meet ? same pinout i guess should be one
i could maybe try and replace all the transistors and caps but if i add the ICs and maybe another atmega (thats not even adding the cost of a programmer for it) and if am really unlucky the screen too it could get expensive FAST and i just might aswell buy another fully built working one and and just repair this one just slow so that the economical impact isnt felt too much
if i do end up buying another one am eyeing the one one known as "GM328A" that has a black pcb and the atmega in a dip package and the caps and resistors are smd some sellers call it "old english version"
like am sure my AY/AT can be repaired and made to work its just am not sure its financially viable at the present moment
sorry for the delays in replying, i since am a beginner i usually try and take things slow and make sure i dont break anything (and so far the only electronics device that ive had issues working in is this one, i managed to partially revive my fathers early 70s sony hifi amp to at least get sound on the right channel only in the mean time) so am not an entire foreign to soldering on pcbs like the seller tries to claim it being my fault
(not to mention other ppl o yt videos have the exact same problem as me)
anyways sorry for the wall of text any help or guidance is greatly appreciated
oh and BTW how do i know if the screen i got sent is a color one or a black and white one ?