Yay!

Here's some rare good news... a guy at work had a bunch of power supplies that he was hoarding for a project that never happened, so he gave me one. Unlike the one in the old computer case, this one was brand new... and it was only 250W, so no decent computer would have anything to do with it, but perfect as a pinboard tester.

So, I cleared a spot on the dining room table, plugged it in, and started playing. It worked great, so I started trying to troubleshoot my one bad CPU. There were only three chips I could reseat without soldering: the ROM, the CPU, and the ASIC which has 80 pins and is nasty to take out. First I swapped the bad board CPU onto my good board and it worked fine. Then I thought I would try to re-reseat the CPU before making an attempt at the ASIC. When I was verifying that the notch was facing the right direction, I noticed that the notch was facing the wrong direction on the card. I put it in correctly and the card booted right up! Poor English guys... they had two working CPUs and didn't realize it!

Here's my first picture! It's a shot of the board from the auction... I've editorialized slightly.