Acorn RiscPC #2: Restoration Part 1

Another RiscPC recently hit my saved searches on eBay and given that it had a second slice to it I thought it would be good to maybe use parts of this machine to upgrade my own. There should then be enough left over to build a full second RiscPC which I can sell to acquire more machines to restore.

Unfortunately this is going to be more difficult than I thought.

Unboxing

When I received the machine I was a little concerned that the parcel it was in was a bit small. It turns out I was right to be concerned. The machine was covered in a single layer of bubble wrap, tightly packed into a small cardboard box. Unfortunately shipping had not been kind.

So far I have found:

• Fascia snapped off the floppy drive.
• PSU snapped out of its mountings.
• Power button broken.
• Multiple cracks and broken teeth to the case.

The cards had worked loose too, but I wasn’t so concerned by that.

Unfortunately the mounts for both springs for the rolling front mechanisms have snapped. I found one spring loose inside the machine.

Machine spec

Looking around the machine this will have been sold as a StrongARM spec machine, it has a revision 3 (last revision) motherboard with a StrongARM 233 CPU card. There appears to be a 16MB SIMM and 32MB SIMM in the motherboard along with 2MB of VRAM. The boot drive is a Conner 540MB and there is a second drive connected to SimTec IDE Podule which is between 2.5 and 10GB in size. It has OS 3.71 ROMs inside.

This definitely used to have a CDROM drive given the cut-out in the bottom half of the case and there is an audio cable loose inside, but it was removed before it was listed on eBay.

As this is a double-height case, it has a more powerful PSU and a backplane for 4 podules instead of 2.

Battery leak

As expected, the battery on the motherboard has leaked, and was quickly snipped off. But saying that it doesn’t look as bad as I was expecting.

After a first pass of a cleanup we can see that I think I have been quite lucky with the motherboard.

Worst case I might need to repaire some of the battery charge circuit, but I don’t think it has affected anything else.

One oddity I’ve spotted is this weird mod to the podule backplane.

This cable was screwed to the PSU and the top section of the case. Clearly a grounding cable. Looks like it snapped the leg off one of the axial capacitors and potential leak from another one. Which is a shame as I only have one spare in my workshop. I’ll have to acquire some more.

Next Steps

I haven’t decided where to start tackling this machine. I’ll either work on inspecting the PSU first, or I’ll test the motherboard using my own RiscPC PSU. Either way this is going to require some glue to fix everything, I haven’t even figured out how I’m going to repair things such as the PSU mounting and power button yet. This will be an interesting journey.