VOGONS


First post, by 19rsn007

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A week ago I traded some stuff I had for a none working Amstrad PCW-10.
This was a less popular PcW machine is what I found on the internet.

A friend of mine had it in a storage with a stickynote on it which stated it wasn't doing anything.
I took it home, opened it up, discharged the CRT just for security (it was sitting in the storage for a while so it was discharged already but I don't want to risk anything)

I managed to get the thing powered up and it shows me the nice paperwhite screen and after about a minute or so it beeps a few times to let me know there was no bootdisk found (3,5" floppy 😀 )
So I started looking for an image of the bootdisk and put it back on a real (DD) disk, to find out the diskdrive wasn't working.
Of course it's a drive with a 26 pin connector so no easy swapping here.

Opened up the drive to see the drive belt was very loose, so gonna replace that soon and I will let you know how that turns out 😀

If this works I am gonna service the monitor.....as you can see in the pictures, it needs some fine-tuning

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Reply 1 of 3, by 19rsn007

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Look, it does composite video output now 😀
This makes troubleshooting much easier (don't have to discharge the CRT now every time I want to work on the board)

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Reply 2 of 3, by Zorix

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Nice machine you have there. I'm surprised the CRT section isn't shielded from the rest. The circuit may discharge the tube after poweroff as well. Strange problem with the tube as well. I haven't worked on CRTs that much but either it's shifted in the housing or the deflection yoke is shifted. Shouldn't be too hard to fix there. Let us know how you progress in this restoration. Thanks.

Reply 3 of 3, by 19rsn007

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I talked to a friend of mine and he also stated the yoke could be out of angle (so to speak), so I'm gonna look into this.

For now I can work on this machine in a more safe way (running it on the LCD), but when the machine is fully working and booting, I am going to put it back in it's case and restore the CRT as well.
Then I am off to play some zork 😀