 Hello everyone, welcome back to Retro Tech and today I've got some very important information for any BVM owners especially BVM 14f1 and 20f1 owners. Now, this is a brand new little article by a blogger and it's on Arcade Hacker and I'm definitely gonna give Eduardo Cruz the the credit on this. He actually posted this in the Facebook group for Sony PVMs and BVMs and other professional video monitors, but he brought to attention the Basically, there's a chance that your BVM could up and just die out of nowhere and what is causing this risk and we'll talk about it here in this video. First off, again, this is for the BVM 14f1U, or f1, 20f1 and you need to check if you do have any other letter or anything after that f1, you may be susceptible to the same problem. So here's the problem. Three chips and they're pictured below, I'll blow this picture up in a minute, found in the BC slot 1 board contain key software at risk of preservation unless we act today, okay? So first off, let's just read about the problem and then we'll go take a look at the picture close-up so we can identify. IC3, which I'll show you in a second, is a 2 megabit flash and contains a CPU code according to the manufacturer's data sheet. It has a data retention guarantee of 10 years. So we are now past this 10-year point on every single one of these chips, okay? Because every one of these chips is going to be over 10 years old at this point. So every single person that owns this monitor with this chip is at risk because this retention guarantee has gone out. Now that doesn't mean it's really going to your chips going to just go out any minute because generally speaking, they don't die out at 10 years. They're generally designed to die out, you know, 15, 20 years yet they'll give them a 10-year guarantee. They generally try to do twice as much as what the guarantee is for a fail rate for most of the time. But there are some that might fail close to that 10-year point. And then there's two other chips on this board 107 and 108. They're 256k bit EEP ROMs, containing key system signals and their data inside will last 30 to 40 years depending on conditions. So this is going to last for those other chips are not as big of a risk. However, if you have weird issues with your BVM not turning on, it could be because of any one of these three chips on this main board here. And Eduardo has come up with an idea. So if you'd like to help preserve these, please dump and read these chips. So if you own one of these and you can get access to an EEP ROM reader or a chip reader, if you can read the files and then dump them on the internet or somehow get a copy over here to Eduardo, he's going to start collecting these data, this data and saving it and archiving it so that we can all go back and get a, if there is a monitor that has problems with one of these chips, we'll be able to get a generic chip, hopefully flash the correct data on it and then just upload it into the monitor, reseed it and restart it. So I just want to show you real quickly. Let's take a look at the actual ICs on here. So first at the top, we've got our two ICs that are 107 and 108 up here towards the top of the screen. Those are the two that will last an extremely long time. Now, thankfully these chips appear to be set where you could remove them without even having to desolder them. But this number, this one down towards the bottom, this IC 3, this is the, this is going to be the main trouble chip here. If it only lasts 10 years, again, the data on it could go out at any moment and that's a big risk. A lot of people aren't going to realize that's what's wrong with the PVM. You could think all kinds of different mechanical problems could be going on, you could be replacing things in the power supplies and recapping PVMs and it could be this chip. So just remember, this is a reason to always check out and see what kind of condition you're getting a monitor in, you know, if, if you're buying one of these monitors, you need to know these kind of things ahead of time away. If one of these chips goes out or if you come into contact with one of these monitors that has a problem and you can't figure out what it is, it's probably this chip. Okay, so just something to always consider. This is just one monitor. Now, since he's put up this post, we've been trying to track and see if there are any other PVMs that have this chip in them and I'm sure there probably are. So if you want to check out the main board, if you own a PVM and you want to check out the main board, I'm going to put a link to this blog spot so you can contact Eduardo directly and either post a comment or, you know, get in touch with him and he'll help tell you how the best way to probably read this information off your board and get it to him. That way we all can have a backup and if you do have an issue down the road, we can all go back to Eduardo and see what he's got. If he's got the files, it might be as simple as getting somebody to write the files onto a new chip and then just sending you the chip, you pop the chip out and pop the chip back in because if you had a replacement chip and this is just a seated chip, it won't be hard. You won't even have to have any solder skills to replace it. You could just pull this board out of your PVM and then replace it. But again, this is just one model. I will tell you personally, the only PVM I've dealt with on a really long term basis has been the A-Series and the A-Series also has trouble with chips on it and if you don't have the correct firmware updated, that monitor won't even turn on. So there's all kinds of firmware issues once you start getting into the higher end PVMs that you have to make sure that at least it's a usable firmware installed on the monitor and also that the chips, their data is still good or you could have all kinds of issues. I'm not sure how the monitor will react if one of these chips starts to go out, but it might be as simple as it straight just won't power on or you could just use functionality in your programming where you might press buttons and things don't happen or you might have other things just not reacting when you're trying to manually adjust them. Things like that are going to be built in or maybe even menus won't pull up and things like that. I'm not really sure. I've not seen one that has had this problem. So again, if any of you guys have any experience with this, if you've seen anything related to this, make sure that you leave a comment here and that you get some information over to Mr. Cruz and we'll try to get this taken care of that way. The good thing about this is if we could get this taken care of kind of now and have a good backup in place on the internet for these chips then we may be able to save some more BVMs that people think are trash. Or you might even be able to get a really good deal on a BVM that's not turning on or something's wrong and it just needs a new chip. Of course that's going to be a risk you'll be taking by buying a broken BVM and having this issue. Now for PVM owners, I've never run into this type of an issue specifically where a chip goes bad and the programming goes bad but there are slots on even the PVM boards where you can attach adapters to, I'm sure to upload some kind of firmware or some kind of change. I don't have any of those tools but it might be simple as something just building a custom adapter and uploading those files. However I've not seen that be an issue with any PVM I've worked on. I just know that once you get into the BVMs it's definitely something you'll want to take a look at. So again just a real quick warning, make sure you know what you're getting into when you get a BVM. If you're considering a high-end monitor first off Google the crap out of it. Research it like crazy. Try to find as much information not only what's good about the monitor but especially what's bad about it. Even at this point we can always go to the CRT spec list and find the service manual for most of these higher-end monitors whether it's Sony, Ikegami, JVC, etc. You can find the manual and read through the service manual and it will sometimes give you updates but even then I've talked to other people that have had to specifically go and buy service manual additions where after the service manual is already made for a specific PVM or BVM Sony comes out later and makes an amendment and sends out just a one-page amendment to all their texts with changes but they never change that original manual. So if you get an original manual that's the first thing to look through but also note that there still could even be updates to that manual that are not in the service manual that you'll find online. So anything we can do together to try to figure out what's going on with these BVMs and PVMs more and more it's going to be a great help. So that's really all the information I have today. Thank you to Eduardo for working on this and bringing it to light. I've been wanting to talk about this but just the timing on this was perfect for it being August 11th and we've got this new story up. So that's it for today. Thanks again for watching. I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content. And please if you have any experience with this or if you're having any troubles with your BVM let's take a look at it and see if this might be the problem on there because if you could save your BVM by just switching a chip out that's going to be a great thing. All right again guys I'm Steve. Thanks for watching. Have a great day.