Sad/Death Chime on IIci

[pinto_guy]

To clarify, I think you're saying that it exonerates the RAM because you're thinking it's hitting an issue even before the memory check as there's no good chime?

Exactly !

 

[pinto_guy]

I only took a quick glance, but if the startup sequence in that doc and for the IIci is anything like the Plus/II, and the hypothesis is that the RAM is good and it's failing before the RAM test, then you might need to focus on whether the ROM has a problem somewhere or perhaps the VIA (UD11) and SWIM (UA11) chips. Those sit near the startup circuit and the capacitors which always seem to do a lot of damage on the IIci boards.

Thanks !! I will study carefully, and yes, I need to remove the caps that I had installed, and redo the recap more thoroughly. I would hate to have you do all this work because of a shoddy recap job on my side. Your help is invaluable !

 

[pinto_guy]

I finished reading: very interesting indeed. This is my first project outside of the Compact Macs, and I'm learning quite a bit. The Mac 128/512 writeup has in fact more info that the IIcx/ci, but the latter does delineate between the Death Chime (failed ROM check), and the Good Chime followed by the Death Chime (passed ROM - failed post ROM, likely RAM). I am not sure why Apple decided to remove the Sad Mac feature, but it definitely makes life more difficult not to have it. Also, I saw an interesting tidbit below and I do see the screen turning black, suggesting that at least the IIci passed the SCC init. If I have time today, I will also focus on the VIA and SWIM chip area, as @jmacz suggested.

Next, interrupts are switched off at $400044 and the Serial Communications Controller (SCC) is accessed. The screen is cleared to black by branching to $4001C4 after setting up the screen buffer address in A2.

The Versatile Interface Adapter (VIA), which controls the keyboard, internal realtime clock, parts of the disk, sound, and mouse interfaces, is initialized at $40007C.

At this point, the screen is black, and the Macintosh has not made any sound, although if you listen closely you can hear the Sony drive pull the head to track 0 as soon as you turn on the power.

After the VIA is initialized, control branches to $4001EE to sound the boot beep.

 

[Phipli]

I finished reading: very interesting indeed. This is my first project outside of the Compact Macs, and I'm learning quite a bit. The Mac 128/512 writeup has in fact more info that the IIcx/ci, but the latter does delineate between the Death Chime (failed ROM check), and the Good Chime followed by the Death Chime (passed ROM - failed post ROM, likely RAM). I am not sure why Apple decided to remove the Sad Mac feature, but it definitely makes life more difficult not to have it. Also, I saw an interesting tidbit below and I do see the screen turning black, suggesting that at least the IIci passed the SCC init. If I have time today, I will also focus on the VIA and SWIM chip area, as @jmacz suggested.

If you really want to go for it, you could put LEDs on the address lines in the PDS or a logic analyser and see if you can see where in ROM it gets stuck?

That... Might be overkill.

Most faults are actually visible on the board, sometimes it can be worth taking a photo, marking a grid on the photo, then really really carefully visually inspecting every pin and trace in a box before marking it off on the photo.

Yes it is tedious, but often faster than more... "Fancy" debugging.

 

[pinto_guy]

All right so I finally had to time to get to my board this morning. I removed 4 Ta caps that I had installed earlier, the ones neat the VIA and SWIN chips. Alas, everything looks clean, and all the traces show continuity. I will repopulate, but thought I'd send you the pics of the board areas where the caps were after removal

 

[mg.man]

Worth checking this guy has good connections?

 

[pinto_guy]

Ha yeah thanks, I had noticed this guy too who looked a bit crooked. It tests OK though.

So I repopulated with a new set of caps, verified again all the traces, and got the same sad chime result. I checked with a scope that I have a lot of activity of the ROM pins, but that was kind of expected since the chime is presumably "ordered" by the ROM. It's just the the ROM sequence "sees" something wrong during booting, and spits out the sad chime. The problem is that we do not know what that "something" is.

Another tidbit: if I remove the jumper W1 during the chime, it stops the chime sequence and outputs a constant frequency. This is also probably expected (sound chip keeps doing the same thing until another command is sent).

 

[pinto_guy]

An update this morning: I had bit the bullet and bought a ROM SIMM on eBay which I received promptly yesterday. Put it in and voila, death chime is gone, boot chime is heard, and I got the ? floppy icon on the screen. This chime was the happiest sound of the week for me . No boot from either FDD or HDD, but I was able to boot from a spare HDD (see pic). After lubing the FDD, I can now read off it, and I'm now fighting the usual sticky actuator on the 100MB Quantum Prodrive. I'm nearly there.

So at the end, the on-board ROM was faulty. Not sure if it's the ROM chips themselves or the traces, but considering the near-pristine LB, and my thorough inspection, I would guess the chips were at fault.

Thanks again to everyone on this forum, and @jmacz in particular who helped exonerate my RAM sticks.

 

[jmacz]

Glad to hear it's working!!

 

[pinto_guy]

Quantum 100MB HDD sticky actuator was fixed. I'm always amazed how robust these guys are against spinning freely, reading and writing with the cover off. I even lightly scratched the top disk and had to re-format. Fortunately, I had made a backup copy after I manually freed the actuator, and everything is fine now. The sticky goo that oozes out from the crash stop of these ProDrives is unbelievable.

I had one last glitch after all this: the sound started to get weak again, and it eventually went off. I had to poke around the sound chips to make it reappear, which worked for a few minutes only. I suspected the caps were not put properly, but once again, after desoldering-resoldering, the problem did not go away. I then suspected a faulty connection to the sound jack (J3) after reading a few entries on this in multiple forums. The jack has a built-in "ON" connector that feeds the speaker, that goes "OFF" when external speakers are plugged. When I removed that connector, I did find that three out of the six pins were broken, most likely by oxidation from the 2 caps nearby (C2 and C3, see pics). There is no good replacement for these Hosiden jacks, so I had to manually add small copper wires to the broken legs. This was quite a project, but I did get it at the end (see photos).

Everything is now put back together and working great !

Connector area after removal of sound jack


Connector with added copper wires (bit messy)


Connector back in place before resolder (bottom view)


Connector back in place after resolder (bottom view)


Connector back in place (top view)

 

[GRudolf94]

Nice find and save on the sound jack.

 

[jmacz]

Nice!!!