I’ve not done a lot of Beeb stuff recently, primarily because the garage has been in such a state it’s been impractical to work in there. However with Christmas gone I can clear a lot of the junk out and that’s given me better access to the Domesday system I acquired late last year. Plus I was in a bit of a stinky mood last night so decided to have a crack at getting it all going again.

Having fixed the monitor, I was confident that I might be able to fix the remaining non-worker! The Philips VP415 laserdisc player is a notoriously cranky piece of kit famed for failures and overheating; since the videodiscs themselves loaded fine and it seemed to try and spin up I was in a pretty bullish mood as I connected it all together and switched the BBC Master AIV unit on.

Uh-oh. Click click click. Something’s resetting the BBC Master computer repeatedly. Disconnect everything, retry, click click click. Traced it down to the PSU which had blown (and thankfully I have some spare BBC Master units I could strip one from) but still a bit of a heart-stopper moment – the SCSI interfaces in those are like hen’s teeth.

So back to the LVROM: nothing on the screen at all, and I still couldn’t find a service manual! I’d already asked on the BBC Micro mailing list with no success last year, but I thought I’d give it another stab and within 10 minutes I’d got two replies telling me about Mauritron who sell service manuals as PDF files! Hurrah! One debit for a tenner later and I was waiting.

This morning the manual arrived by email. It’s taken me five minutes to put the LVROM into service mode and got an onscreen result error code ‘007’ meaning ‘Not in focus after 5x (no rotation of disc)’. Now this could be one of three things: the focus module, the control module, or the decoder module. My money’s on the focus module, which may (fingers crossed) just need a clean.

As a side-point, at least the debug info appearing on-screen indicates that the video circuitry is working and the monitor works too. There’s still a thousand things that could go wrong yet but I’m quietly optimistic 🙂