Packard Bell PB486CD restoration (Part 1)

come on [Music] hello and welcome today I would like to talk about one exciting PC which I bought a long time ago and was trying to repair all that time it is a 486 multimedia PC made by Packard Bell as you see it is quite compact probably two-thirds of the width and high of the standard desktop PC unfortunately the front panel is very much yellowed especially the CD-ROM drive but with a little bit of retro brighting this should be fixable there is a warning sticker on top which warns in German from freezing something in some industrial device probably something what was connected to this PC in a German Factory this sticker will be of course removed later interesting is that the floppy Drive is gray and not beige first I thought that it was replaced but I found some images online of this PC which also show the same gray floppy drive so that came like that from the factory on the back we have the PS2 mouse and keyboard ports a VGA port parallel and serial ports and the power supply unit this is obviously not standard it is much smaller than a standard ATP skill the thumb is quite small and potentially noisy here is a sound card with a joystick port and full audio in an output Port Packard Bell often relabeled as tax on cards and this is one of such the exact model of this PC is pb486 CD obviously PBE stands for Packer Bell 486 is the CPU type and CD stands for CD-ROM drive which was installed from Factory with that and the sound card this model became multimedia VC as far as I know similar setups were made with all the CD-ROM drive and the sound card as well they were not named multimedia then but otherwise they were the same now let's take a look inside to open the case you have to push up two blinds on the bottom of the front panel where you can find the screws one holder is unfortunately broken two more screws have to be removed on the back after that four screws were removed to remove the case cover it has to be slid to the throne yeah as I said one holder has to be glued the first cool thing as it was often made back in the days a sticker with a short main board overview and jumper settings which is glued under the cover this is super handy here you can see all the CPU settings cache selection front side bus clock settings and schematics where all those jumpers can be found on the board [Music] here we have a hard drive which is located on the side and can be easily replaced if this one is still working I'm curious which software we can find there well as I said pack a bell often relabeled as tax on cards in its systems and this is one of such cards and right away there is another very exciting detail the CD-ROM drive which is connected to the sound card is a rare model such 40 pin ribbon cables were used to connect usual IDE drives but in this case the sound card doesn't provide an IDE connector it comes from the early days of the CD-ROM drive and you can connect only proprietary Sony mitsumi and Panasonic drives to it the cable goes to the Panasonic Port so despite that it uses the same 40 Pin cable as it was used for the IDE drives its spin out is incompatible to the standard IDE I will come back to the CD-ROM drive later now let's take a closer look at the sound card This Thread cable is a PC speaker pass through and it looks like the connector on the other end is broken that is easy to fix this white audio cable goes to the CD-ROM audio output [Music] so here is the sound cards as you see there are Packard Bell stickers on the ICS but let's take a look at the FCC ID i38 mmsn 811 there is one nice Page by section Fox where you can find a lot of interesting information about various Aztecs on cards at this point thank you very much to the offer for this great overview there you can search for the FCC ID and this packet bell sound card is in reality a sound galaxy Nova 16 extra I don't want to peel off the stickers but it has to be a song card based on the IC azt1605 it is a sound blaster Pro 2 compatible card extended with a wavetable header which by the way a real song Blaster Pro 2 didn't have and it provides indeed mitsumi Panasonic and Sony CD-ROM ports this is actually a very nice sound card which is not only fully compatible with the 8 Bits on Blaster Pro 2 with a real Yamaha opl3 FM synthesis but it also gives us stereo 16-bit Windows sound system sound which is implemented using these big Crystal cs4231 IC there is a minor issue with this card though it reports the DSP is version 2 which was used on the older songblaster 2 and not pro which had DSP in version 3. because of that this sound card will be Auto detected as a mono sunblaster too but this can be worked around by setting Sound Blaster Pro 2 manually in the most games with such an option in the setup the main board is very dusty it is a good sign and means that the case probably hasn't been open since the beginning the installed CPU is an Intel 486 sx33 it is quite slow and is a good candidate for an upgrade an interesting observation here is that both memory slots are empty as you see this looks strange especially because I assume that this case was never opened and actually all parts should be in place well remember this for later the cash sockets are also empty in combination with a very low end CPU it looks like Packard Bell tried to save every cent no problem I have some spare SRAM ics for a decent upgrade the video chip is a service logic GD 5428 a very compatible and fast video chip that lasts for those it is my favorite because it also works very well with TFT displays without vertical stripes unlike many other video chips from that time for those gaming series logic is my usual preference for Windows however there are better options furthermore this board provides only one megabyte of video memory with this 2 times 512k ICS and for Windows it's better to have more if you want to work with high resolutions than 800 by 616 bits color for 10 24 768 you already would need 2 megabytes and there are two extra slots for video memory expansion but they are proprietary and I don't have such modules maybe a topic for a project in the future [Music] thank you the system has only three ice expansion slots however the graphics card and the i o controllers are on board so three expansion slots should be okay one is already populated by some cards two more left for a network and more I think that the onboard series logic VGA chip is bound to the CPU through vlb and is not limited by the low bandwidth of the isobots yeah and there we go I was afraid to see that a leaky battery [Music] [Music] the hard drive is a Conan 210 megabytes I will come back later today [Music] and here comes the CD-ROM drive it is Panasonic cr563b a rare model which is quite expensive today correct me if I'm wrong but as far as I know it was used in the 3DO gaming consoles with its proprietary Panasonic interface and a lot of people are hunting for it today because these drives were quite unreliable and need a replacement it is an early and slow to speed CD-ROM drive which was also distributed by creative labs in a bundle with the soundblaster pro 2. by the way one CD-ROM speed means 150 kilobytes per second so two speed means 300 kilobytes per second I could replace it with a much faster and more modern 52 times speed IDE drive but I would be glad if this one is working and I could keep the system in its original state the front is very much yellowed and needs to be retrobrited as well the interesting thing is on the back as you see we don't have the usual Master Slave cable select jumpers here which can be found on the usual IDE drives but there is device ID selection instead similar as with scuzzy devices here you can select IDs between 0 and 3. currently it is set to zero right from it we have a 40 pin port same as on usual ID drives but electrically incompatible this drive should be connected to an IDE controller to avoid any potential damage another funny weakness of the old times the power switch unlike today with the ATX power supplies where we have digital power switch back then there was a physical main switch on this machine the switch is directly on the PSU and there is a this plastic handle which goes all over the case to the front panel where it is hidden behind the button [Music] okay time to take a closer look at the main board the chipset is ACC micro and I think this is a prime utme I don't think that I ever have seen these chipset in person something new what does the Retro web database says yeah supports 32-bit 486 system designed with cache and drum controllers there's a local bus and integrated peripheral controller okay it looks like my assumption with the vlb graphics card could be true yeah and left of it there is already a lot of oxidation what a shame as I already mentioned there were no memory modules inserted into the slots but this system looks untouched to me so where's the memory the cache sockets near the iso slots are empty as you see but here we have couple of ICS which do look like memory and it is every chip looks to be a 4 megabit dram IC with a chips we then should have 4 megabytes of onboard memory this was plenty back in the days for a 486sx 33 and explains why we don't have additional modules and exactly looking once again at the schematics we see areas marked with Sim and dram would be cool if both memory types could be used simultaneously but first we have to neutralize the electrolyte with white vinegar if you are curious why I'm doing this I made a video about it a long time ago [Music] [Music] now it's time to make someone nervous again let's watch the board using tap water and some soap [Music] thank you [Music] the good news is that the board is clean and dry again the bad news is that the leaked battery made a lot of damage there are a couple of damage traces which are even visible with a naked eye let's make a first test and try to power up the system [Music] there seems to be no shorts on the power rails I will connect the monitor just in case it will post and we will also need a post analyzer card and we see no numbers on the analyzer card this board seems to be completely dead at least the CPU gets warm just in case of camera I check the jumpers but they are all five as I said I don't think that this PC was ever opened or modified so that was expected okay now let's check the CPU clock on the 486 this is pin C3 I use a wire inserted directly into the sockets and we are getting 33 megahertz very nice the next thing to check is if there is some activity on the address bus for that purpose I use my Isa prototyping board with an angled either razor cards this way it is very comfortable to check the various signals and we have some activity on the address bus indeed so the CPU is alive and something happens on the board as well this is also a good sign also on the data bus there seem to be something as well this means that the chipset is probably alive too so I took a closer look at the traces around the battery and there was a lot of heavy damage in this area some traces were completely missing and but this is not the worst because those were at least visible with the naked eye there seemed to be quite a lot of micro cracks which are not visible even with a magnifying glass some traces without continuity were running under the ICS which didn't look well either I had to remove the ICS to get to the traces underneath and unfortunately as I struggled to dissolve the parts I didn't notice that the battery in my camera got empty so I didn't record that process one issue with the heavily oxidized solder joints is that the solder doesn't melt anymore it gets brittle and the oxidation destroys the solder pads as well this is what unfortunately happened here the solder pads turned out to be totally Hidden Away by the spilled over battery electrolyte I also overheated the ICS trying to remove it so I will need a replacement for that but I'm more worried about the pads and the good news is that there seem to be still enough so the pads left to hold the new ICS in place this traces seemed to have a lot of micro cracks but with some polishing and hitting maybe this can be fixed also these traces are all destroyed and this Trace has even vanished partially I will have to add a lot of jumper wires to get it all working again I drew a schematics where I marked all the broken wires red means front side and blue is on the back some missing pads and traces have wires nearby so for stability reasons wires can be soldered through them however those wires are still filled either with oxides or with solder mask and I'll have to remove it somehow and as always I clean the traces with the polishing tool until I got the shiny copper traces back those have to be tint now to the wires I bought this set of 0.3 millimeters tiny drill bits which fit perfectly fine into the wires they are very brittle and I broke the first one very fast but with a lot of patience I could freeze the wires very well using it foreign [Music] after that it was time to turn the traces and add wires on top [Music] of course soldering wires on top of the traces was only possible in sports where the traces did at least partially exist foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] restoring the pads is not an easy task but luckily more than the half of the old pads were still there so I decided just to use wires instead of pads [Music] foreign [Music] not to use the old IC since I overheated it during removal so I ordered some new Replacements this is a 74 HC 151 multiplexer this old ring is a bit tricky since there are no more flat paths and the IC shall be lying on top of the jumper wires instead but soldering the IC did work fine the real problem started as I was trying to fix the traces they were very thin and there were a lot of micro cracks and I barely could see whether thinning was good enough and where I would need more jumper wires I was trying to work with a lens and my camera which has an impressive macro mode but that turned out to be more tedious than I thought so I decided to give a microscope a chance and went online to search for one as I said in my last video suddenly I got an offer to make a review of a microscope which I happily accepted and I was not disappointed I thought that it would be hard to work by just looking onto the screen but after some warm-up that turned out to be easier than I thought here I'm forming and soldering a 0.3 millimeter thin wire to an essay so ic16 Chip where the distance between the pins is only about 1.2 millimeter I was really excited and surprised how well it went [Music] [Music] [Music] oh foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] eventually I had to repair a lot of broken traces some could be fixed invisibly by enforcing them with a wire others by putting external jumper wires but all that work was still not enough by the way I also replaced the original Dallas r2c chip with a pin compatible one from Benchmark which I also use in my RTC modules since Dallas was also heavily oxidized and I didn't really know if it is still working after all the work the board woke up to some extent and some numbers were visible in the post analyzer card but the initialization stopped at the error code zero two after zero one on a word and later Phoenix voices this usually means that the RTC fails to initialize so I checked all the pins for continuity and again the microscope helped to find the culprit as you see probably due to the heavy oxidation previously the pad didn't hold on the PCB anymore and lost its connection to the trace first I tried to solve this using a blob of solder but that didn't really help so I enforced the connection with a piece of wire once again [Music] and after that you will not believe how happy I was as ISO postcodes running through on the analyzer and eventually the Packard Bell logo on the screen what a relief I was working on and off on this main board for about a month trying to revive it I even played with the idea to use another similar board in this machine which would fit but I wanted to keep this computer as original as possible and now we should hopefully be on the right way at least this system is booting into doors from the compact flash card this is already a huge step forward and in the next part I'm going to take care of the case PSU drives built everything up take a look at the hard drive which was installed in this machine who knows maybe we will find something interesting there I would also like to make some upgrades and hopefully end up with a very nice 486 gaming machine I hope you enjoyed this video and would join me in the next part soon so far thank you and goodbye [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Necroware

Views: 27,197

Keywords: retro, hardware, soldering, repair, review, nerd

Id: _raWL7RNXNw

Length: 26min 40sec (1600 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 10 2023