I was rather hoping that my long-winded series on fixing a 48K Spectrum had concluded with Part 8, but it turns out this Spectrum had one more surprise in store for me. Last month, I borrowed its keyboard whilst testing a new ROM image in my Harlequin. I tested it afterwards and it decided to fail with garbage on screen. This is symptomatic of lower RAM failure, so I quickly unplugged it, got my multimeter …
It’s been over 6 years since I last looked at my poorly ZX-Spectrum. When I started this project, I found it a bit of a struggle to desolder the single RAM chip in Fixing a poorly ZX-Spectrum (Part 6). I think this was partly to do with my frankly agricultural old-school Weller soldering iron. So my enthusiasm for desoldering the remaining RAM chips was not particularly high. To cut a long story short, over Christmas …
I’m back on the case now repairing my faulty Spectrum after a couple months away from the project and am quite keen on wrapping this up fairly quickly. I’ve finally found a reliable supplier of RAM chips (through the World of Spectrum forums), a very helpful chap called Ben Versteeg, who has a quite interesting Spectrum related website. Ben suggested I replace the faulty TMS4532-20NL3 with a 4164 chip as they are compatible with my …
