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Emulator III : Repairs
Overview The Emulator III is not one of the most reliable products due to the very large number of electronic components and the card cage which has lots of mechanical connectors. After 15+ years you are likely to encounter failures. The main problem areas are the original hard drive, the floppy drive, the PSU, the LCD and sliders and buttons.
Warning Please only attempt a repair yourself if you are competent at servicing electronics, use a service centre if in doubt. The SP-12 is easily damaged or melted by amateur attempts at repair.
LCD Overview
The Emulator III uses a 20x4 character LCD. We have not identified the LCD model, but it is probably an Optrex.
LCD Age
After around 2000 hours use the LCD will need replacement, and its a good idea to replace the LCD whilst parts are still available. You can check when the LCD was manufactured by looking at the code stamped on the back of the LCD in black. The first 2 characters are the year, and the third character is the month. 87 or 88 is a typical build year.
LCD Inverter The LCD backlight (the blue colour) is driven by a small inverter that generates 100VAC at 400Hz from a 5V supply. The inverter is a NEC (NEL-D32-46), and its a small black plastic box that sits below the LCD.
The inverter can fail, which means no blue backlight, in which case it needs replacing.
EL Backlight Replacement
An easier solution to replacing the whole LCD is to replace just the EL backlight itself. This works well if you know the characters are working okay but you just cannot read them properly. An added plus is that the black on blue lettering remains, which is easier to read.
The EL backlight is easily removed by unsoldering the two connections on the LCD and then pushing the backlight out using a credit card. The new backlight can then be slotted in and the connections soldered in place.
Case Fans The Emulator III is rather renouned for its higher than usual
noise level, created by 2 cooling fans and the internal hard drive. The cooling fans are high quality and super low noise, so replacing them with a more modern fan is not really an option. However they do wear out over time and it is worth
replacing them with identitical units - if your EIII has been powered up for long hours over the years.
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 3.5" Floppy Drive
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 New floppy drives are still easy to find, although they are not the standard computer product.
We recommend the TEAC FD235HF-A529 which is in black and has jumpers for
setting the ID to zero. These drives cost more than the typical PC component, but they can be found from some TEAC dealers. You will also need the correct 41 mm bezel in black which is about $3. Order it from a TEAC dealer or TEAC direct.
Buying
Try your local TEAC dealer
Or contact Route66 Studios
 TEAC Disk Drive Jumper
Settings
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Slider Knobs |
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 The Emulator III keyboard has two slider knobs which can be easily lost or damaged. Try www.farnell.com for spares.
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Push Buttons |
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We suspect these are buttons from e-switch, probably they are 320.02E1-1.08BLK.
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Hard Disk |
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The Emulator III originally used a 5.25" Seagate 40 MB drive, but more modern 3.5"
hard drives appeared as time went by, such as the 40 MB Conner drive also used in the Emax II. Given the noise of these older drives its best to either remove it and use an external ZIP drive or to use a more recent 1GB SCSI drive. The
EIII has a reasonable SCSI implementation provided the latest OS 2.42 is used, so a variety of drives can be used.
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Rotary Pots |
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The Emulator III uses poor quality slider potentiometers which should be replaced.
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Power Supply |
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The power supply is getting old by now and failure is not uncommon. One of the rails
may go out of specification. Replacement PSU's are not available, so the best option is a service centre repair or you could use one or more new linear PSU's. We don't have the current rating of the original PSU.
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