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Is my atmos dying?

Posted: Fri Nov 21, 2014 8:57 pm
by peacer
I have a strange problem with my Atmos.

I was not having such problem at all in previous years. But it's acting like this since few months. (maybe since beginnig of this summer..)

When I plug the power cable, regular black-white blocks are seen on the screen but instead of booting to normal Oric atmos ready message, it just stays in that page and hangs up.

I plug and unplug the power cable few times and then it boots normally. When it's booted, I can run atmos, load programs from media player device playing wav files and play it normally for a long time until I had to unplug and plug power.

I don't know if this situation is related to my cumulus run attempts but I observe that, it started after I try to run cumulus many times and failed. Some of you will remember that my atmos was not running my cumulus. But now I am not using expansion bus for cumulus with this device.

Thanks god I have a second (end new) atmos sent by Steve which can also run Cumulus. But I don't know what is happening with my first Oric.

Sometimes I had to plug & unplug ten times or more to boot it up with success. Normally it should boot in seconds..

Do you think this could be a memory chip failure indicator? As far as I know, Oric controls memory chips during that white-black bars screen before start-up

Maybe this information helps : It does not matter if I run oric for the first time or run it more than hours. Sometimes it boots in the first attempt. Sometimes after many trials and fails.. So I think its not due to warm-up or over-usage..

If you think its because of failing of memory, can we find any replacements for them? Or do you have any suggestions for detecting the problem and solution?

Thank you.

Re: Is my atmos dying?

Posted: Fri Nov 21, 2014 11:08 pm
by iss
Hi peacer,
I don't think the RAM is faulty.
You can take a look here: http://forum.defence-force.org/viewtopi ... 595#p11595
where we discussed such problem and changing capacitor C21 solved the problem.
But maybe by you it's another case - if you have more power adapters you can try how Oric boots with every one of them.
The input voltage must be DC from 7.5V up to 12V (9V is the normal value). Oric booting depends strongly on how fast
the power supply reaches its nominal value and on the value of capacitor C21 (it holds the 6502 in reset state for awhile exactly to allow the power to "become stable").

Re: Is my atmos dying?

Posted: Sat Nov 22, 2014 1:07 am
by peacer
Hmm... this is a very nice suggestion, thank you.

I am using the same adapter for both my described old Atmos, and the new one from SteveM boots with it in a normal way.

Changing capacitors will be my solution, I hope.. Thanks.

Re: Is my atmos dying?

Posted: Thu Nov 27, 2014 9:25 am
by Vyper68
Been away for a while so missed this. As has been pointed out earlier I had a problem with my eBay Atmos taking several cold boots before it was stable and replacing C21 fixed the problem. They are really cheap to buy ( £1ish ) and easy to fit.