RE: My Tragic C64 incident

Entry posted by OldSchoolRetroGamer April 1, 2020

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RE: Commodore 64. Reading a thread regarding a members current issues with the Vic-20 reminded me of this ? Once (I learned a lesson ? well, sort of) back in the early days, my first C64, the classic breadbox model, I loved it so, I even painted the case a cool shiny BLACK with spray paint. NOTE: Image show is not mine and included for descriptive purposes only. Sadly, I had more balls than knowledge and was always tinkering, wanting to see the guts of a machine etc. Do you know where this is going? I disassembled the machine BUT, and I think this was my biggest mistake in all this, with the cover and shielding OFF for some reason I still had it plugged in and turned on and poking around looking at the chips with screwdriver in hand I explored the guts noting numbers and labels when suddenly I dropped my tool (I MEAN MY SCREWDRIVER!) and there was a pop sound followed with a spark. It all happened so fast, I do not recall seeing any obvious damage but....well after putting everything back together, at first I was happy to see the machine start up and at first thought eh, everything fine but.....nope. Turns out everything I loaded, whether form cassette or disk just ran at the wrong speed, I don't recall if it was super sped up or super slow, IF I had to pick one I am pretty sure it was super slow, as if every process went from normal to the speed of a snail crawling through molasses, it seemed to work normally otherwise from what I recall but nothing was playable or usable after that. Oh man I was soooo upset and mad at myself. Such things were rare commodities for me at that young age and I was never going to get a replacement that's for sure, I had gotten it used as a hand me down. I learned a valuable lesson that day I can tell you. Oh I still tinkered, took things apart and explored every electronic item I would be lucky enough to get, MOST reassembled and working again successfully. Anyway, there was a time I got ONE hell of a shock that I think made my heart possibly stop temporarily while working at the back of a 26' cabinet RCA CRT Television but that's another story ?

Note mine (it's long gone ?) but similar

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Keatah 16,302

Posted April 2, 2020 (edited)

Reminds me of the time I blew-up my Apple //e. I had gotten a //e upgrade to move on from the II+. And some months into owning it I pulled out the Apple-Cat II modem card with the power on. First time I really destroyed a computer. It just shut down and would not power-up past a screen full of white/inverted "@" characters. All 960 of them. The sinking feeling was overwhelming especially to a kid.

Sucked royally because I had just gotten the system not even 6 months ago. And I was religious about anti-static discharge by touching the power supply first. And even more religious about checking for the red power-on LED. Missed it this one time and poooff! I had to save up about $150 for a motherboard replacement. Thankfully the modem card was fine.

I've unplugged cards with the power on before, though not the safest action I suppose. If you pull them straight out you won't short anything. But some cards are wedged in good, and they're long. So it's all to easy to rock them back and forth thus crossing contacts - especially 12v power contacts with 5v logic. Boom!

First and only time I accidentally did something like that.

Edited April 2, 2020 by Keatah