Saturday, June 22, 2024

Halcyon v2 repair log - RAM not working correctly

So I've got far enough with my Halcyon clone project to get the CPU working properly.  I wrote a small test program to test RAM I/O and also that the second EPROM (U32) can be read properly.  Right off the bat, my test program reported a RAM test failure.

After doing some digging, I isolated the problem to pin 20 of the RAM chip not having the proper timing.  This pin is driven by pin 8 of U18, as shown here:


A logic analyzer capture of a looping RAM read/write operation revealed the following on my clone PCB:


Pin 8 was starting and ending late.  You can compare this to the original Halcyon where pin 8 much more responsive:

Being utterly confused, I decided to hook up my scope to get a better view of the problem and saw this:
Finally, I looked again at the schematic and noticed that there is a capacitor attached to this line. Doh!

The problem ended up being that C39 needs to be a 0.001uF cap, not a 0.01uF cap.  Once I replaced the cap with the proper value, things started working.

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