[Coco] Ebay IC's quality

[Luis Antoniosi (CoCoDemus)]

Hi people,

It's not the first time I had problems with scrap IC's sold on ebay.

My first problem appeared with commodore 64 SID chips. A lot of 10
chips only 5 weren't completely dead and among those 5 none of them
were perfect. Some had one blown channel or bad filters.

Yeterday debugging my new wordpak2+ card I found a short circuit on
dram lines: RAS and AD7. I tested all connections, removed 9958,
removed all DRAMs and I found a bad 4464 DRAM with short circuit. Then
I replaced it for another dram from same lot (bought on ebay) and
bang: other 2 pins were shorted too.

Then talking to Daniel I found that the VDPs I just bought are not in
fact V9958s but a V9938s. There weren't V9958 in 1984. These chip were
rebranded:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/261031498657?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649

Ebay is a scrap and fake IC's paradise. Take care when buying cheap IC's

-- 
Long live the CoCo