C64R MK2 problem detecting my working VIC-II (white screen)

Hi and thanks for a super nice board!

I have a problem where my MK2 does not detect my ceramic & golden PAL 6569R1 (26/83) VIC-II properly, sometimes it detects is wrongly and most times it doesn't detect it at all and all I get is a white screen (never black). The chip was pulled from a working C64 and was socketed so no risky desoldering was needed. Unfortunately the C64 board I pulled it from got scrapped for parts so I can't test the chip with it anymore and right now I don't have any other C64 boards or VIC-II's to cross-check with

The latest boot I just tried detects it like this:

... and looking at the terminal log here are detection results from other boots I tested today:

Things I've tried:

• Swapped between A/V composite and S-Video - no change, always just a white screen
• Tried different displays, both plugged in directly and with an HDMI converter
• Swapped between two different power supplies, one is an expensive HP-labeled 4A one that I use with HP terminals
• Tried the ZIF socket scraping trick, though with gold plated pins it's unlikely that the chip had corrosion
• Tried booting without CIAs

I'm running out of ideas here and like I said right now I lack a second VIC-II or a board to test with. Could it be that both of my power supplies suck? They are both "good", one is a 4A HP and the other is a 2A Amazon.de one (but not one of the super cheap ones). Or could it be that something has happened to VIC-II itself? It came from a socket and I haven't really touched it too much and I always ground myself, but anything's possible I guess...

This is the original 250407 longboard the ceramic 6569R1 VIC-II was pulled from, and in this board it was working a week ago (until most chips were pulled from this board).

Thanks for that tip, now I get a picture so it seems the chip itself is ok. It's still detected as a 8565:

The attached image is from S-Video output through an HDMI converter to an DVI monitor. Looks good, some vertical stripes but still better picture than I've ever seen from a real C64.

Shut down the machine so that I could connect a keyboard and test CIAs, this time the chip detection resulted in this:

I still get a picture after forcing 12 volts to VIC-II and the keyboard+CIAs work so other than the VIC detection everything seems ok. Now I'm perfectly ok buying a newer cooler-running 8565R2 if it's too complicated to get this golden chip working, but I can also help you debug to get this one up and running properly.

So I have 8565 R2 0687 on my way here both because it should have a bit better image quality than 6569 R1 but mostly because it won't need a heatsink (which is really hard to fit into a C case). So I'll be able to test with that, but that won't happen until next week because the post office here has been unbeliveably slow lately....

Nope, don't have a good multimeter here, I'm not home for the rest of the year so got a slightly limited access to electronics-related stuff at the moment. Also the multimeter I have at home is some cheap thing I bought 20 years ago so not sure if that would classify as "good" either.

Anyway if I need to order something I'll rather order a known good PSU from your shop than another multimeter. Could also get a second SID which I failed to order along with this board...

EDIT: Testing further I noticed that the "expensive" 4 amp HP-labeled 12V PSU has horrible ripple noise so I think I'll just order a known good PSU from you.

Just ordered the "offical" C64R power supply from you guys (+ an extra SID), it should arrive next week along with the 8565 R2 so I can test different combinations of PSU and VIC-II.

Yeah, realized that earlier this morning. No rush, have a nice vacation.

The local post office finally decided to deliver that 8565R2 I ordered two weeks ago, so I just plugged it in and tested the machine:

And exactly the same on second boot:

So now it's detecting a 8565 as 6569 which is... logical. Picture quality was really good even with my sucky S-Video converter so I'm definately going to leave this later generation VIC-II in there - but as long as it gets detected incorrectly I'm not going to use the machine for any longer periods of time.

Also managed to borrow a semi-decent multimeter so that I could test the current Amazon PSU - I got 11.98V under load which seems pretty ok to me. Anyway once you guys come back from holidays and send me the offical PSU I can do some more testing (in a couple of weeks after sending thanks to the speed of the local Finnish post office).

Quote from KimH

Also managed to borrow a semi-decent multimeter so that I could test the current Amazon PSU - I got 11.98V under load

Tested the current PSU without load and got 12.19V, a bit high but not alarmingly so (but I'm not an electronics guy).

So got the offical Commodore 12V power supply from Icomp by mail today and tested the two VIC-II chips I have here with it. First tested the newer 8565R2 and it was detected as:

Then tested with the older ceramic and golden 6569R1 and it got detected as:

So no change, and as before both chips work just fine after correcting the input voltage from the debugging menu.

Now before anyone suggest that I send the board back let me remind you that I'm in Finland. It'll be cheaper for me to buy another C64R than to try to get this one sent back to Germany succesfully. In fact it would be faster, easier and more reliable for me to walk to Germany over the Baltic Sea with this board than try to get it shipped.

And just to complete the information this building is an old university building - in fact this very building used to be the electronics department of Helsinki University of Technology, so I'm guessing this building has above average supply of electrons. Also the whole building is pretty empty thanks to Covid, and recently rebuilt from ground up and I guess all the cabling was changed. Testing with my borrowed multimeter I get 235 volts from the extension cord I used to power this C64R which while isn't exactly 240 volts is still good enough. What I mean is I'm quite certain my supply of electrons is reliable enough and there's something else that's wrong.

I might be able to get my hands on a third VIC-II (8565R2) later next week (will steal borrow from a friend) just to see what happens.

Another week, another VIC-II :D. This one is a 8565R2 28/88 stolen from a 250469 shortboard and \o/ finally gets detected correctly:

Since this particular VIC-II works with my C64R just fine and the shortboard works with the previous VIC-II (which didn't work with C64R) I'm just going to swap the VICs and call it a day. Shortboard won't care which chip it has and this C64R seems to detect everything properly now so I'm happy.