If you're interested in getting that clone running, most likely it's some elecrolytic capacitors (they're relatively colourful, and look like cans sitting on the circuit board) that degraded and failed. They are two pin devices, almost guaranteed through-hole at that vintage, and cheap to replace.
You may also be able to just replace the power supply, as it's usually the first thing to fail.
There are hundreds of caps on it, it may be a while before I figure out what went wrong :-)
On a related note, I bought a Carver stereo in the early 80's (M-200t amp and C-1 preamp). I run it every day all day. That's 30 years of daily use. And yet it still works like a champ (I replaced the on-off switch as it wore out). I guess they didn't use cheap caps in it!
Electrolytic caps go bad when left unpowered for long intervals. The plates depolarize - but can be usually be restored by slowly raising the applied voltage. Gear that has been left off for years should be slowly powered up over a day or two in small steps with a variac.
Walter Bright! I remember Zortech C, and some micro cross compilers. Thanks.
I never thought that that might be necessary. Thanks for the tip! But it's probably too late now anyway :-)
I was going to see what I had on that old AT hard disk.
I had a 486 that hasn't seen power since 1993. I tried powering that up, but the POST beeps suggested the keyboard controller had failed. Oh well. So I pulled out the drives, and my external IDE controller wouldn't recognize them. But my old Windows XP box's controller did, and I was able to read the old drives (200Mb and 500Mb respectively). It was kinda fun to see what detritus I'd left on them, but sadly no gold bullion.
That 486 was the last machine I had that would boot OS/2. Oh well! To the dustbin of history.
Yeap. Most gear over 10 years old is likely to have this problem. Power supplies, TV, cheap a/v gear.
As an interesting note, I cracked open /A/D/S car amps and related gear from 1980's. Crazy engineering... No tantalum or electrolytics anywhere in sight. Props to whomever worked on that.
You may also be able to just replace the power supply, as it's usually the first thing to fail.