Bogus isn't the word.
£350 that card cost me in 1995 - I was a student. I waited impatiently for 6 weeks for it to arrive from the States. When it finally came, I plugged it in... ran the install disk.. rebooted... "Cannot open janus.library".
That's all I ever got.
Eventually I found that it had a bad bit of dual-ported RAM, but this was after several other attempts at fixing things. I think the 74LS74 was bad too - it wasn't autoconfiguring.
My brother and I had a go at fixing the RAM by soldering in one of the other RAM chips. We didn't know in those days that the main RAM was static column, not Page Mode (we didn't know there were two types of Zip RAM!).
About 4 years ago, I finally twigged that it had had the wrong RAM in it all these years after we tried to fix it. Since that attempt I'd got hold of another A2386SX and had been switching chips to track down bad ones. One of the chips - a 74ACTQ244 - died on the operating table (lost a leg). Typically enough, this is an incredibly hard to find chip. Hence the chip socket on the board that's not filled (my '244 is in my working 2386SX).
Since those days I've managed to track down four new 41464AZ08 Zip RAM chips (that was no easy task, I can tell you).
These boards are very difficult to desolder on without lifting tracks - that's why there's lot of wires added on. Most of the wires in the photos are to make sure of bad contacts caused by IC sockets and chips where lifting the chip took the track with it.
Unfortunately no-one ever came up with a schematic... would have been more than useful.
Every now and again I take another crack at this board to try and sort it. It's more of a principle now.... even though my A2386SX is faster (it has a 486SLC2/50 on) and I have a 486SLC GoldenGate, I still want this board to work.
I really need another A2386SX for parts, so I can get a good 74ACTQ244. Incidentally, I do actually have some of those chips - but they're SMT. I bought them just in case they come in handy and I find some way of reliably soldering one into a DIP package!
My next task I feel is to remove all the IC sockets, and do a high resolution scan of both sides of the board. Then I can identify any dodgy-looking contacts and check them with the multimeter. Once that's done I can solder in known good chips to get it as close to original as possible, and try again - I have rather more experience of these things now (just completely re-capacitored my A2000 a few days ago, for example)!
By the way, don't suppose anyone has any 74ACTQ244 chips handy, do they...?
