by bassybeats | Oct 28, 2023 | Retro Gaming
After a bad power surge both my original crystal xbox and the component switcher died a horrible death. This started with the dreaded flashing orange light.
The Symptoms
Orange flashing lights and bad capacitors were the start of this project. It took a while to remove all the capacitors only to find that the CPU was dead shorted. This was the only the first motherboard I had to work on.
Musical motherboard swapping
after reaching out the retro facebook group for parts someone sent me a 1.6 rev board that was unmodded but the case, drive and dvd drive were all bad which was a great donor for my machine. Little did I know that the case of the crystal 1.4 and the donor 1.6 were slightly different. I had to cut a couple of plastic standoffs to get it to fit.
Thankfully, the board worked with one downside, the 2tb drive I had in the console with all my games on it was locked to the other machine.
Remodding the console
Once I got the motherboard booting then next step was to unlock the HDD and re-lock it to the new one. I opted to use FatXplorer64 to do this with a HDD caddy.
I readded the Aladdin mod chip to the new mod chip but also ended up running the MechAssault Rocky5 hack to repatch the HDD with a new dashboard as it seemed to have gotten corrupted in the whole process of it dying. Something to remember, there are different versions of these discs and not all of them work, you need to check the number on the edge of the disc to make sure they match, not just the game case as I learnt.
by bassybeats | Oct 28, 2023 | Retro Gaming
This is round 2 for the SNES. It has had a re-cap in the past but some of the leaky cap juice was missed and continued to corrode away traces. This was found out while trying to get a SNES scart cable working.
Fixing capacitor leakage
First step was neutralising the corrosion where the caps were and then it was finding the shorts. Turns out the leakage had gone through some via’s and blown out a diode on the underside. It was just a jellybean diode and was a quick fix once I found a replacement. I opted for a hacked in through hole part to get it working since the pads were eaten away.
Modding a Scart cable for PAL
It seems that every single Scart cable for the SNES you can buy is for NTSC, which means if you want it to work on a PAL system you are going to have to modify it. The symptoms that it is the wrong cable will be extremely dark video output. Its a matter of removing the the capacitors on the RGBS lines and replacing them with 75ohm resistors to work with a PAL setup.
by bassybeats | Oct 28, 2023 | Retro Gaming
All this started from watching the Macho Nacho video about making a Gameboy Macro using a faulty Nintendo DS or DS XL.
Doing the mod
As referenced in the youtube video I just followed the guide here on gameboymacro.com. All you need is a couple of 330 ohm resistors and some wire to move the speaker.
The only issue I ran into was I had to swap the ‘main screen’ option from the top screen to the bottom screen through the menus.
Fixing the case
To make everything a bit nicer I removed the top case entirely and used JB Weld to fill in the holes left over and the cracked casing. Because it was cracked and filled in I had to paint it anyway so I went with a gloss black paint for something a bit different.
by bassybeats | Oct 28, 2023 | Retro Gaming
After a powercut / surge this Joytech component switcher decided to died along the the OG Xbox that was plugged into it.
Stripdown of the unit
Stripping down the unit was fairly straight forward. Everything looked fine and there was no immediate problem visually. The investigation started with caps, voltages and finding shorts, none of which seemed to be an issue.
Faulty chips and testing
After running out of ideas I decided to remove some of the logic chips and test them in the TL866 programmer. Turns out all the CD4051 chips were all internally shorted. Swapped some new chips on to the board and everything was back to normal. A fairly easy fix one I found the issue.
by bassybeats | Oct 28, 2023 | Retro Gaming
I was offered a deal, get some PS3 3DTV’s working by reflashing the firmware and I get to keep one of them. The downside was that just before I was going to pick them up most of them got stuck in flood waters.
Starting condition
The first 2 I picked up were before the flood damage, the rest sadly were very much worse for wear. Some were only good for parts. There was still a lot of water in them and alot of corrosion.
Repair Work
most of the PCB’s got put through the Ultrasonic cleaner, resoldered some parts and disassembled the LCD panels to get the mould out between the layers.
Programming
When it came to programming, I followed this guide from DBWBP.com to reprogram the chips. All these units were the 7400 model. I used hot air to reprogram the chips as it was easier, but you could possibly use one of those clip on bios programmers. I used a TL866 to do the programming and I dumped the corrupted files off the chips before flashing the new firmware on them just to be safe. Then it was just a matter of resoldering them back on.
Up and Running
After reassembling the TV’s it was just a matter of powering them up and testing them out. Some didn’t power on due to the water damage but I think I ended up with about 4/8 units working at the end of the repair session.
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