1050 RIOT chip

[xrbrevin]

Hi,

I recently attempted to fabricate a track display for the 1050. I managed to get the zero to work and also to increase the track number but further meddling caused the drive to malfunction.

So I ordered a replacement RIOT 6532 chip. It arrived today and when I fitted it, all the drive does is spin the drive motor. I get the slow boot error.

I understood this chip to be like the PIA - i.e. an off-the-shelf part. Does anyone have any experience of replacing this? Maybe there are variations and I ordered the wrong variant?

Here is a pic of the ordered one, thanks in advance!

 

 

[+DrVenkman]

They’re standard parts that were made into at least the early 00’s. I bought a lot of 5 of them from eBay a few years back that look similar to the ones you got. Unfortunately, 2 of the 5 tested bad in a 2600. They would work for some things but not others (reading one of the console difficulty switches, for instance). 

[tmp]

is it from china? it looks like a remarked chip in which case it could be anything inside (including real r6532p)

Edited February 29, 2020 by tmp

[+tf_hh]

Hi,

 

it´s an absolute standard part. The one shown in the picture is the 1 MHz version, working fine in any 1050. When you order them from one of these chinese sellers on eBay etc., keep in mind, that 50% of the delivered ones have failures. Sometimes these are faked, too.

 

 

[+Nezgar]

The 6532 has 128 bytes of RAM used for the stack... which would potentially explain the issue if it has bad RAM. If ordered from china, there's a higher chance of a recycled dud... cheap enough to order a few at a time and hope for the best...

 

Edit: mfg date code 1901 - 1st week 2019. Is rockwell still making new ones that recently or is that a sign of obvious fake/relabelling?

[xrbrevin]

wow thanks for all the informative feedback. it was from ebay / china and the pins look suspiciously grubby. it could well be a dud.

i will pull one from a working drive and see if it helps diagnose it.

i just thought that seeing it only cost a quid fifty it was worth a shot. maybe it is a sh*tty-shot...! (groan)

 

with the old RIOT installed, the self-test seems to pass ok. then powering the Atari the SIO polls the drive fine - it spins up as it should but slow beep boot error follows. i tried pushing down lightly on the head and also applying pressure to push the head back and forth on the rails but i get no reading beeps. i think it may be component-fail related. time to swot up using the FSM and the Sam's manual methinks

[+DrVenkman]

13 minutes ago, xrbrevin said:

 

it was from ebay / china and the pins look suspiciously grubby.

 

I’ve gotten plenty of brand new/made in the last couple years chips from Digi-Key and Mouser and the pins are often oxidized too, so that’s not really an indicator. Chances are these are just NOS stuff bought by the tens of thousand by wholesalers in China when Rockwell shut down 65xx fab operations in the early 00’s (note the 2001 date code on that chip). They may or may not have been QC failures before they were bought too - there’s no way to know.

 

What might be fun would be to put one of them into a 2600 and see if/how any defect manifests itself there - failure to read console switches, games crashing due to bad RAM, etc.