You'll find a lot of more-or-less okay radios with that chip poofed.
But you won't find a lot of those chips that are still good inside a radio that was totalled for some other reason. Bad chip, good radio not uncommon. Good chip, bad radio is the rare combination.
Gonna be like looking for a good used radiator hose at the junkyard. The CPU from a mobile 2950 of that era will work if you add header pins that connect to the two brown plugs leading to the pushbutton board. Tricky part is finding one that's not already poofed. Had a customer who had bought three of them, hoping to fix his 2527. None of them worked when I hooked them up in a working radio. Pig in a poke.
That series of CPU was just poof prone. Most of the many failures we have seen fall into two major categories.
First would be the 'big' radios, from 1995 to 2000, like the Saturn Turbo, Eagle 5000 and RCI2990. The power supply regulator in those radios would fail and put 24 Volts onto the radio and the CPU board. Big hint for these was to see a small fragment of the black plastic blown out of the chip. Customer would typically report hearing a "SNAP!" from inside just as the display went blank. Had a pic of that on my ImageShack account, but can't seem to locate it now. Dern!
Second on the hit parade would be excess voltage on pin 3 of the mike socket. Since the keying pin on that radio doesn't connect to the radio, it "keys" the computer. The computer then turns around and sends an output to the radio board's T/R switch to make it transmit.
The CPU runs from 5 Volts. Connecting a 13.8-Volt relay coil to pin 3 of the mike socket looks like a clever way to activate a relay and key your ham linear without a foot switch. The excess voltage will poof that input on the CPU. Typical symptom is that the little legend "TX" on the display won't go out, and the radio stays keyed all the time. This CPU won't change frequency while transmitting, so the radio stays stuck on the last frequency it was on before the moment of poof.
And sometimes the CPU just fails. Had one customer who had the radio on during a storm. Lightning hit the phone line somewhere nearby, and a spark jumped from the landline phone on the desk to his D104. His DX2527 was perpetually stuck in transmit after that.
RCI ran out of that board 20 years ago, more or less. Not sure they ever imported the chip alone. The program inside that makes it work came from RCI, so there would never be any other source for it.
Been wishing for a way to finance an outright replacement for the CPU and display. A 'drop-in' that simply replaces the original display/CPU board would cost more to develop that I have on hand to invest. Ten years ago I would have figured the market for it to be pretty good. This many years down the line I'll guess a lot of the "poofed CPU" radios have already gone to the landfill. Probably too late to sell enough of them to make back the investment.
Gotta figure the older two-board CPU and display (with the coin cell on it) would work, but all the connectors are different. Never invested the time to hack a hookup. Theory says it should work. Haven't seen anyone else succeed.
Or even try.
73
