800XL booting to yellow screen..

[Mclaneinc]

A mate has rang me up saying his XL boots to a yellow screen with no ready prompt, he said he was looking inside but must have touched something..

 

Anyone had a yellow screen and know the fix..

 

I aked him why he was going in to the machine and he said, "to give it a clean"...

 

Plonker...

Edited October 15, 2020 by Mclaneinc

[flashjazzcat]

Dead CPU or bad RAM are common causes.

[+Nezgar]

Could also be a dead ROM... Is he close enough to you to try attaching your Sys-check on his system? (I believe you had one?) That would supplant the internal RAM and/or OS of either of those are bad.

 

Otherwise, in lieu of a sys-check or another system to swap IC's with, I could mail a replacement programmed EPROM. Probably the cheapest thing to replace first. I can also include a 2nd OS EPROM programmed with Shoestring's RAM tester to know for sure the RAM is good too, and if not narrow down the specific chip. PM if interested.

[flashjazzcat]

Could be any number of things; statistically it is more commonly the CPU or RAM than a bad masked ROM. There is a list of half a dozen less common possibilities we could run through (MMU, PIA, etc).

 

SysCheck is the obvious first thing to try if one is available, since it will usually eliminate a bad CPU and isolate faulty RAM/ROM. If you still see a yellow screen at that point and the board isn't socketed, the solution is then to send the machine to a technician.

 

 

[Mclaneinc]

Thanks people, I'll take a trip to his place on the weekend with my syscheck and see where we go..Thankfully he's in East London, I'm West London..