Mk2 board wouldn't work . .

I received my Reloaded MkII about a week ago. I had to order a new VIC-II chip and a CIA chip to replace defective ones. However, I still could not get it to work.

I started removing chips for troubleshooting and once I got down to only the CPU and VIC-II I was able to get a blue screen with no text. The dead test cartridge would run also.

Any time I inserted any other chip into its ZIF, I could not get a video screen. The green LEDs behaviour was also inconsistent, sometimes blinking or solid or off after cycling the power.

At this point, I began moving the chips back to the original (5-pin video) C64 motherboard. Once I got all of the chips re-installed, that motherboard worked.

For now, I'm going to use the original system and start collecting chips to populate the Reloaded MkII motherboard for future.

I was able to get the serial terminal working on the MkII, but it would not consistently recognize the chips.

Any help you can give me would be greatly appreciated. Hopefully I can get this running since it looks very well designed and built. I'm sure I missed a step in the assembly or overlooked some very important instruction step.

OK, it will be a few weeks since I need to get more parts.

Today I was able to do more troubleshooting with good chips from an original working C64. The problem was with the power supply I was using. It was marked 12 VDC @ 1.5A, but as I began adding the SID and CIA chips to the board it would stop working. When I switched over to using my bench top power supply the board began working. I’ve ordered a 12VDC / 5A power supply off Amazon. When powering the board from my bench top supply, it reported a 0.45 amp draw, so that wall wart I was using before must have been really over rated.

. . . And I also updated the board firmware using the update tool . . Worked well.