Alright, horror is a bit dramatic. Bear in mind I love my MC-4, maybe not quite to the extent that I want to be buried with it when I die, but you know.

The softly glowing power switch had gone wonky, with one side slightly pushed in. I didn’t really think anything of this until the other day when I went to switch it off and it fell in completely, and then started flipping off and on as if it was panicking…

…and then I started to panic, and lunged for the mains switch.

Then the switch fell out completely – here’s the button with the two broken bits.

Clearly one of the plastic (not delicious) orangey bits had fallen off at some stage, so it was just a matter of time until the other one broke. The bobbley bits are the parts that the switch face pivots on, they clip into holes in the on the inside of the body of the switch:

…which is looking pretty manky after forty years or so.

I glued the pivot points back onto the switch in the hope of getting it working again, but I couldn’t balance the contacts and springs and squeeze the switch face into the body it without hearing it all coming adrift.

I didn’t fancy taking a guess at how it should go back together when 230V would be bouncing around inside, so I started looking for a new switch, more out of hope – and found this from RS for a panel cut-out of 30x22mm:

Not the right colour, but maybe the right size?

Time to pull the old switch body out, and it was a bit of a fight. I took a photo of the markings on the side of the original in case anyone comes across a warehouse full of the things – marked T100 16A 2WI XII, and also T 65 C UND.LAB JNC LIST.

I made a note of all the connections before desoldering:

After carefully heatshrinking the connections, and doing a bit of testing with a multimeter, it fitted in place perfectly:

Flip the switch, nothing goes bang, it glows…

and success. (Still a shame about the cracked screen, nothing to be done about that really).

I’ll keep hold of the original amber switch in case I manage to finagle it back together.

While we’re here, let’s have a look inside. First time I’ve actually had it open, most things usually succumb to the screwdriver in the first week or so – here’s the transformer/noise filter/power supply board.

Here’s the main board, the Sharp version of the Z-80A in the middle-top, 16K of Mitsubishi-flavour memory on the left and 10K of EEPROMs including the system program on the right.

I went off into a little dream for a bit thinking, ooh actually, it seems like there’s actually 6K of memory address space free for extra code – maybe we could add some extra functionality.

Even if that’s technically possible, I realised it wouldn’t be much fun actually finding somewhere to put the extra ROMs and wiring up the additional select lines from the ROM address decoder at IC60.

And then desoldering the EEPROMs, installing sockets, reading the EEPROMs, disassembling the code, re-learning how to write Z-80 assembly (not that I was ever very good at it) and then about a billion other things.

It would be easier just to recreate it, like I’ve been talking about for the last ten years or so. Maybe this scare will spur me on.

Here’s the extra 32K of memory on the expansion board, with the connector on the right leading from the main board, and the connector on top leading to the digital cassette interface at the back.

This MC-4 has a serial number that works out to being built (according to the handy Roland/Boss serial number decoder site) in September 1981, and the date codes on the ICs on the main board all line up with that, but expansion board ICs are dated 1982/83, which is weird.

I would have wondered if mine was an MC-4A (with 16K of memory) later expanded to an MC-4B (with 48K and the digital cassette port) but for the fact that the serial number plate clearly says it’s a B. Maybe the extra RAM board chips were failing and another one was subbed in.

Here’s the back of the front with the lovely period wiggly lines.

Now it’s all back together and working happily.

So anyway, if you’ve got an MC-4 still in use, go easy on the power button.