Re: Flakey ZipChip 8000

[James Littlejohn <narguthru@yahoo.com>]

On Feb 14, 8:53 pm, Steven Hirsch <snhir...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have an 8Mhz. ZipChip that's been out of service for a while due to general
> silliness and I decided to give it another shot today.  This is one of the
> units with cheap, thin tin-plate pins that bend if you look at them too hard.
>   After a heart-stopping experience bending two of them on the way into the
> motherboard, I decided to put it more or less permanently into a socket of its
> own for protection.
>
> About 15 minutes of aggravation, I realized that no amount of care in the
> world was going to get all 40 leads into a machine-pin socket :-(.  I finally
> was able to seat it into a conventional tin-contact socket and plug that into
> the motherboard.
>
> The problem is that this thing won't start unless I press lightly with my
> thumb on the front right corner.  At that point, it comes up and runs more or
> less reliably (although it does not reset from OA-Ctrl-Reset, I have to power
> cycle with my thumb on the chip).
>
> This thing may not even have one more round of insertion left before pins
> start breaking off, so I'm looking for advice on solving the intermittant
> problem and mounting it permanently in... something.  What have folks done
> with these things to get around contact problems?  Is there life after broken
> pins?
>
> I can almost imagine a circuit board with a pair of 20-pin headers and 40
> holes offset a bit so I can solder the ZipChip on permanently.

I had foreseen this on my Zip chips and on Accelerators for the GS. I
desoldered the CPU socket and installed a ZIF socket on both my IIe
and IIgs motherboards.