After sitting for a few years, I decided to try and resurrect my MB6582 yesterday. I spent basically all day rewiring the CS and baseboard back together, which included having to work around lifted solder pads and got it /almost/ complete. A strip of LEDs on the matrix aren’t working, but that’s fixable.
What is more difficult now is that two of the four screws the hold the panel to the top of the case popped off, so now that panel off the top. Anyone have thoughts on how to fix that? I can try to re-JB it, but with the CS already connected to the baseboard, that’s going to be prove tough. So I was thinking of drilling screw holes on the panel but I don’t think I can do that with extreme accuracy. One of the reasons the panel sits so high is that the cabling I got (from DigiKey) is just a bit too long and also rigid. It’s what caused me so many issues the last time, but I have cabled it up a bit different this time around and I’m hoping that will put less stress on the joints. Either way, it looks a bit silly with the panel sitting up off the case so much
Another problem is that, while it boots up saying “MIOS version…” when it gets to the main SID screen, the display goes all garbled. Sometimes it will get fixed by playing around with the panel. I think it’s the 4-bit vs 8-bit mode thing perhaps but I don’t know exactly how to fix that either?
I thought that too, but why does the MIOS boot screen always come up in cleartext? The screen repeatedly gets garbled after that screen (like when it’s starting up the SID app). I seem to remember there being something significant with the LCD between those steps but I can’t remember what it is.
Ah perhaps it’s the speed of updates or something then? Hmm…I can bust that LCD test program to see what that does and go from there. The unlit LED strip will be easy to fix (I know it’s a short since I can put the panel in a configuration that it’ll work)…the panel…eek that’s going to be harder to solve, I fear.
You could also use the MIDIO128 app to test this. Each received MIDI note will write to the LCD, so you can control the “update rate” by yourself (just play some notes on the virtual keyboard of MIOS Studio).
Alternatively: I just noticed that the MBSID application includes an alternative LCD driver (app_lcd) which is enabled by setting the LCD section of the PIC ID header to 7.
It can also be set by software from USER_Init:
clrf MIOS_PARAMETER1
clrf MIOS_PARAMETER2
movlw 0x07
call MIOS_LCD_TypeSet
With this driver, the LCD can be used in 8 bit mode.
