After an our of probing I found that UK6, the video ROM, was missing a connection on pin 10 with UD8 on pin 4. I made a direct connection with a piece of thin wire, and... wait for it... it finally works! 8-) 8-) 8-)
Here you can see it is displaying the "you did not properly turn the...
The journey continues... I've just replaced the 74LS166A with a 74HC166A, and it seems to work again! ...But only partially.
We finally have video on the monitor again, but is is overlayed with a striped "jail bar" pattern:
I've checked for continuity on all the connections the 74HC166A has...
Found a nice datasheet here: http://pdf.datasheetcatalog.com/datasheets/270/334520_DS.pdf
On the first page you can see the function table; I could see parallel data on pin 4 and 5 with the scope, clock is running and power is OK.
Pin 1 (serial) is tied to pin 9 (clear) and constantly held...
I assume you mean the neck board; I already checked every single component on that one, even replaced the transistor, but that didn't help. I also haven't got another one, so it is quite difficult to swap them. ;-)
Made some progress: there is no input serial video signal on pin 9 of the UG6, which should have come from pin 13 of the 74LS166... need to do a continuity test, but otherwise I think that 74LS166 is our culprit!
Just checked the outputs of the muxes, and... it looks like they work fine. I probed the mux output pins (7 and 9 of the 74F253's) on UC7 pins 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17, but they all seemed to display serial data. Let's look further from there.
I've just checked all the rails of the PAL's, but they all were just fine.
The UG6 chip got a approx. 15.3MHz clock on pin 1, which would be the system clock /2, so I assume that is correct.
See it for yourself (it is far from a perfect square wave because my scope is too slow in digital mode...
I was wrong on the fuzzy line stuff, I just hadn't set up the scope properly for such small data.
This is what I got directly on the logic board, probe on pin 13 of the UG6 IC, the video data output:
The signal isn't all that strong, only around 100mV P-P.
This is the signal on the inputs...
Quick follow-up: I just probed the outputs of the 74LS38 chip with the scope and found the outputs on pin 3 (horizontal sync, got a nice 22.2 kHz square wave, so it works as it should) and 6 (vertical sync, got a short pulse every 15 ms, so seems to be working okay) to be working correctly, but...
Well, I just got around to measure all the resistors on the neck-board out of circuit, and they measure all fine. I also replaced C15 on the analog board with a nice PP cap I had lying around in my spare parts drawer, but that also had no effect. What points should I check with the scope or...