8bitbubsy
Well-known member
I have a Macintosh IIsi that would give the sad mac chime since it had severe issues with onboard RAM (bank A), so I desoldered the RAM chips and their bus transceivers (74ALS245AD) as they were corroded anyway. The board now chimes and boots from floppy or HDD, but I get a black screen. It syncs, but the picture is all black. I didn't have the right VGA adapter before, so I couldn't test if it gave a video output before I desoldered all the stuff.
This makes me wonder, is the video framebuffer fixed to bank A, even if bank A is empty (desoldered)? Would this also mean that a IIci can boot with RAM in bank B only, but would show a black picture? If anyone could test that, that would be great.
Also, would it be possible to force bank B to be bank A (if that didn't happen already), or does that require a ton of rewiring? There's a lot of lifted pads for the onboard RAM + bus transceivers, so I'm not going to bother trying to refit that stuff.
This makes me wonder, is the video framebuffer fixed to bank A, even if bank A is empty (desoldered)? Would this also mean that a IIci can boot with RAM in bank B only, but would show a black picture? If anyone could test that, that would be great.
Also, would it be possible to force bank B to be bank A (if that didn't happen already), or does that require a ton of rewiring? There's a lot of lifted pads for the onboard RAM + bus transceivers, so I'm not going to bother trying to refit that stuff.