MicroVAX II Console Garbling Characters

Mouse mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG
Wed Aug 24 10:34:33 CDT 2016


>> I have a MicroVAX II which has started garbling and losing
>> characters output to the console.  [...]
> Iâ??ve seen similar  with under two occasions.  [...]

Furthermore, "garbling" is horribly imprecise.

If certain characters always get corrupted, and a given character
always gets corrupted to the same thing?

If it's always the same characters getting corrupted, but they get
corrupted to different things on different occasions?

If there's no uniformity on which characters get corrupted, but a given
character, if corrupted, always gets corrupted to the same thing?

If both which characters get corrupted and what they get converted into
show no consistency?

Each of those scenarios points towards a different constellation of
plausible causes.  (Furthermore "same characters" can be taken either
of two ways, either "characters with the same bit pattern, regardless
of where they occur" or "characters at the same place in the output,
regardless of bit pattern".  It could even be a cross between those.)

Similar remarks apply to "losing".

The post also said

>> It had seemed that re-seating the processor board would fix it, but
>> that no longer seems to be the case.

It occurs to me that it might not have been the re-seating that was
responsible, but something else incidental to that.  For example, if
the problem is thermal, powering it off briefly might have helped; if
(to continue that theory) if the environment has been getting hotter,
it may be that leaving it off briefly now doesn't cool it enough.

Without more details, we can't really do much but take stabs in the
dark.

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