Munchausen

Sorry for grave digging but I have just built this circuit and I searched all over the internet for an answer to this and eventually figured it out so I thought I'd give an answer.

I don't know what capacitor you have in your circuit but in the datasheet it will give you a 'shunt capcitance' to be used with it, typically 18 or 22pF.

Now, the crystal needs this much capacitance in parallel, but you need a capacitor value such that the cap value + any latent capacitance in your circuit = the shunt capacitance.

On PCBs the latent capacitance is quite small, but with strip/vero board the linear tracks cause _much higher_ latent capacitance in your circuit, much too high for the crystal, so in fact you probably already have far too much there.

I spent days playing with this and was going a bit crazy. I then realised this, and cut all the traces in my strip board connected to pin 3/the capcitor to make them as short as possible (no left over strip that goes nowhere). Before everything was black and white and blurry whatever I did, now its in perfect colour! Also, you can use a little trim capacitor to tune it to the right value, or just try some different values. Now I cut the traces I even get colour with no capacitor present.

Probably you've forgotten this project a long time ago, but maybe this can help someone out!