IT'S WORKING AGAIN, AAAAAAND NO...

To say the least, I was very excited when I got to take the Nova 3 main chassis home after 19 years. I managed to rope in a couple of friends to help me as it's damn heavy. It's hard to believe I could lift it by myself with some effort 20 years ago. Unlike in those days, I didn't want to just plug it in and fire it up without testing. I had to wait until the next weekend for that.

I pulled out the power supply regulator board and tested for shorts and such.

All seemed okay until I got to the 20,000uF capacitor on the 5V line...

Bugger! Went back to the storage cell and grabbed my spare power supply in the hope that the capacitor was in good enough condition to reform. Nope, it was internally shorted as well. The other capacitor was okay and was able to be reformed so I put that in its place, even though it was a lower value, but I was going to run a really lean system so I wouldn't tax it too hard. I then reformed the four massive capacitors in the chassis before reinserting the regulator board and bringing up the chassis without cards on a variac, using an automotive lamp as a load on the 5V line.

I checked the voltages and all seemed good. I put in the CPU, Triple Option, and a 16k memory card and powered it up. Nothing blew up and all front panel console operations worked. Success! I entered Carl Friend's timing test program and it ran without issues - click the photo below for a video.

WONDERFUL!!!

So the next step was to put in the Cassette I/O card and test serial output. I put the card in, inserted the console cable, and turned on the machine. All lights came on like a program was running and it couldn't be halted. The console panel was alive with activity but it wouldn't respond to any of the switches. As far as I knew, nothing had changed but the Nova 3 was now no longer working. I decided to call it a night and not do anything further until the replacement screw-in capacitors arrived. I seriously hope none of the cards have been destroyed.