Re: Strange ASCII character mixup in my iigs

[Mitchell Spector <mitch2gs@hotmail.com>]

Wolfgang Kemper <wkemper@work.com> wrote:

>Hi,
>I hope someone can help me to figure out what is wrong with my iigs.
>during boot up and if you run dos or prodos the lower case "a" is always 
>replaced with "#". It is not the keyboard ,it also happens on the boot 
>message and even if I have no Keyboard attached.
>
>Every DOS or PRODOS softw#re will show this bug in pure text mess#g#s.
>(Just to show how it looks)

    Just out of curiosity, what happens when you type a lowercase "a" under
a graphical based GS/OS application, say TeachText or AppleWorks GS?
Does the character "a" or "#" appear on screen?

>I do not know a lot about the iigs (for now) but I thing the character 
>generation is mixed up ... but how could this happen? How to fix it.

    I first suspected the 'Display Language' in the Control Panel settings 
is the culprit here, however "a" is not one of the alternate characters
that is affected by the setting. Hmm, could be corrupted battery RAM
bits, try clearing that by pressing Control-Option-Reset and then select
option "2" from the menu.

    Another possibility is corrupted main memory. Try pulling out the RAM
card and see what that does (better yet, if that doesn't work, remove 
*all* cards and anything else that plugs into the IIgs except the keyboard
and a display).

>PS:
>uppercase "A" and all of the other characters are OK.
>Running the self test is also OK

    I'd suggest running the "Apple IIGS Diagnostics" that Apple dealers 
used, it verifies the character display generator, keyboard, and generally 
probes much deeper than the built-in diagnostics. I uploaded a copy of
it to the Ground FTP (which is down/gone but a mirror exists where you
can find it--I'll see if I can't locate it, it's very poorly organized).

    Could also be bad RAM on the motherboard, or a faulty VGC. Try the
above first to narrow things down first.

Mitchell Spector