Weird problem - need advice! Green screen of death!

[aftyde]

Hi All,

 

While waiting for me here in Manila my TI99/4A and PEB seems to be on the blink. When I run anything that appears to want 32K access - the screen goes solid green and all the lights on the PEB go out. So for example, if I have a disk in DSK1, use EA5 to run DSK1.DIAGNOSTIC it starts loading - screen goes solid green and all the lights go out. Power cycling the TI brings it back - then, for example - I might try WDS1.DM2K.DM2K and same thing - loads from hard disk, but then green screen. I can run BOOT (in both 40 and 80) - and catalog disks, however - WDS1 will lock the system up.

 

Guessing 32K card but looking for ideas. I have pulled out the cards that seemed suspicious - so no more pGram+ or Horizon RAM card - just MYARC DDCC1, SCSI, 32K and Firehose.

 

Ideas?!?

 

Cheers, Arthur...

[Shift838]

I had the same exact issue when I was using a Cartridge Expander. I removed it and fixed the problem.

 

I would suggest pulling the SCSI card out as well to just go to a base system. If it still has a problem take the 32k card out and see if you can load a small basic program that does not require the 32k. If that works then replace the 32k and try again.

 

It could even be your flex cable card or anything else hooked up to the side of the 4A. Dirty contacts, etc..

[+arcadeshopper]

if you have a flashrom99 or xb27 cart there's diag and memtests on both also one for a superspace

 

Greg

[aftyde]

Sadly - I have neither with me. Tried to load a program called DIAGNOSTIC and it went straight to green.

Is there a way to return the available memory in Extended Basic?

[aftyde]

SIZE reports 11840 and 24488 so... hmmm....

[aftyde]

Well, nothing left to pull - the DDCC card could be toast I suppose... or the memory, or the firehose, or the console... or maybe the PEB itself.

Removing the WHT, Horizon, pgram+ and audio card seemed to make no difference.

Guess I'll bolt it all back together and bring a console with me when I am back here in Nov... crap!

[+Ksarul]

SIZE just checks for the presence of expanded memory--it doesn't actually verify if the entire space is good. Since it looks like the load starts before the green screen, I would suspect the 32K card as being the issue as my first thought--with grunge and such on contacts between console and card as another hightly likely culprit.

Edited January 9, 2017 by Ksarul

[Stuart]

With XB, you could use CALL LOAD and CALL PEEK to loop through the 32K and check it.

[gfreige]

CALL LOAD works? I had a toasted 32K card and CALL LOAD gave me a SYNTAX ERROR

If CALL LOAD works you can use a XB program to test the memory (typing it from the console) or just use a Mini Memory and a TI BASIC program to do the same if CALL LOAD didn't work in XB

 

Good Luck

[mizapf]

You can also use CALL LOAD/PEEK in TI BASIC when Editor/Assembler is plugged in, and it does not require a CALL INIT before. As it seems, the module does not check whether the memory expansion is there while in TI BASIC.

[+RXB]

You could try a XB program:

 

10 CALL INIT

20 FOR X=-1 to -24576 STEP -1

30 CALL LOAD(X,255)

40 CALL PEEK(X,Y)

50 PRINT X,Y

60 NEXT X

 

It should crash before it gets to 40 as it just overwrote the same program in Expansion 24K memory.