I'm back in business!

[airship]

Well, after literally months of my C128 getting flakier and flakier, I finally bit the bullet and brought C128 #2 in from the garage. It had a bad keyboard (mechanically) but everything else seemed to be okay. I swapped tops on the machines, which I hated to do as #2 actually had the whiter case, but my cute little Suncom Icontroller is stuck to the yellow one and I was too lazy to swap keyboards anyway. Turns out #2 also had a bad keyboard CIA so I swapped in the drive controller CIA from #1. Now #2 has got two bad CIAs and a nasty keyboard. I also had to transfer the 64K VDC expansion board, which is okay because I boogered up #1's board trying to stick it into the VIC socket. (Oh, yes I did!) It worked okay but I didn't even want to think about how jury-rigged it is now. I even put the shield back on #2, since I'm suspicious that part of #1's problem might have been running it for so long without one.

So now I have what appears to be a fully functional C128 again! Yea!

Took me awhile to figure out my 64HDD installation again, but now it's up and running except for long filename support. I've checked and rechecked things and can't figure out why it's not working. Oh, well, it worked before so I'm bound to get some inspiration eventually and get that working, too.  In the meantime, I've got three drives mapped to the PC's hard drive, and one mapped to its CD-ROM. Life is good.

Shoot, I even dusted off and plugged in my Partner 128 cartridge!

[hydrophilic]

Glad to hear you up and running, even if I'm confused as to which "one" you are using considering all the swapping.

I even put the shield back on #2, since I'm suspicious that part of #1's problem might have been running it for so long without one.

Good idea.  I think it would be okay to leave the large, thin shield off since the RAM and CIAs don't seem to get too hot.  But the VIC gets hot enough to cook eggs!  (very small ones of course)  Does the shield fit with the 64K upgrade installed?

[airship]

Does the shield fit with the 64K upgrade installed?

Sort of. The heavy shield pops up over the upgrade board, so it sits at a slant. Then the thin shield has to be pushed down to be able to be screwed down in the corner. The plastic case fits over the whole works okay, though. At least I know I've got good contact between the VDC and the heat sink! I'm pretty sure the VIC isn't touching as well as it would be otherwise, but it does seem to have some contact, since it sits way against the side where the video shield still pops all the way down.

We'll see.