July 2013

Back again with the x0xb0x! SuperNick (Nick) has been making some more progress on this rather interesting little synthesiser, so I thought I’d put together another quick video showing how things are coming along. We’ve been experimenting with the analogue circuitry, particularly the sawtooth waveform. There’s a temporary test arrangement... Continue reading

What’s that? A transistor stopped my 8 V electricity flow? I’ve narrowed the missing rail down to the transistor stage, but that does not yet prove the transistor itself is the culprit. We’re getting around 7.7 V going into this particular area of the circuit, but only about 0.05 V... Continue reading

Anyone get that Oliver! reference in the title of this video? We check over the original findings when I first took the two Aiwas apart and attempted to work out what needed to be done. Thankfully I keep notes or I’d have no idea what I’d previously done! :) Continue reading

Here’s the test of whether the capacitor replacement fixed the first of the two symptoms I was chasing: very low volume. With the mainboard recap out of the way, it’s time to see what this Aiwa Mega-CD will actually do! At least we’ve got some music coming out of the... Continue reading

Electrolytic capacitors can deteriorate with age, heat and use, and these Aiwas have plenty of ageing capacitors to investigate. Here we have a great example, recapping an Aiwa Mega-CD boom box. Not the Sega Mega Drive part, just the Aiwa boom box part in this four-part series of videos. The... Continue reading

You can never have enough demos of this tool. It is by far my most valued for desolder work. Desolder braid doesn’t come close for through-hole work. For those of you wondering what makes the Hakko 808 so wonderful, here’s a little demonstration on a circuit board from the mid-1990s.... Continue reading

Here’s just a quick test on some 7806 voltage regulators. I’ve been getting questions about them, and with the Aiwa Mega-CD causing trouble on the workbench, I had a very good reason to demonstrate one. The 78xx family contains fixed positive linear regulators; the last two digits conventionally indicate the... Continue reading

Here we are with the Aiwa Game Unit again, and this time we’re actually getting somewhere with the repair! I’ve been reconnecting the damaged traces around the BIOS chip and fitting a proper socket. It took a while to work out where everything needed to go, but the result is... Continue reading

Well, the me of the past didn’t do such a good job of removing that BIOS chip… but the good news is, we can rebuild him! We have the technology! If only I had my Hakko 808 back then! :) The MPR-15768-T ROM had been removed for the earlier BIOS... Continue reading

Picked up so many of the things, now I just need to give them a good cleanout and see how many of their innards are still working. Welcome to the army of retro PlayStations! I’ve managed to accumulate a rather ridiculous pile of the original Sony consoles, all in various... Continue reading

A quick look at an x0xb0x being built by my work colleague SuperNick (Nick). It is a DIY analogue synthesiser based on the Roland TB-303, and this is an Adafruit-era build. Since this video was made, SuperNick (Nick) has tested parts of the board using an audio-card oscilloscope and confirmed... Continue reading

One day I’ll use surface mounted electrolytic capacitors… one day, just not today! Close call on the most faulty (bad blocks!) of all the drives, but we were able to recover thanks to vias in the PCB. Not my best repair job ever…! The solder pads on one drive were... Continue reading

Just some poking around at how these hard drives were put together, nothing terribly exciting but figured the internet should have more on these WDL-330P drives. I’ve managed to accumulate three of them, and they’re rather interesting little pieces of IBM hardware. The drives are 30 MB models that can... Continue reading

As you can see there is a hole blown through the S-MIX chip at U10. The following repair attempt will proceed in the next few weeks. I originally labelled this board SNSP-CPU-02. In my 2016 follow-up, I identified the photographed board as SNSP-CPU-1CHIP-02; the photo also shows its S-APU at... Continue reading

Here we go repairing the traces on Super Nintendo UP15971140 that were corroded away by an unknown liquid, probably many eons ago. This is the one that was producing some rather spectacular video distortion, and after poking around with the multimeter I’ve managed to narrow things down to three damaged... Continue reading

We are recapping a 1CHIP SNES today and here’s the process I follow and, as a general rule, follow whenever I do some recapping. I personally prefer radial electrolytics to SMD electrolytics. It doesn’t look as pretty, but at the time I expected them to last a little longer than... Continue reading

Here’s what I do when removing SMD capacitors from boards. So far I’ve had two lifted pads. One was the very first I removed (whoops!) and the latest was on a SNES where corrosion had weakened the trace and pad. You can’t win them all, just hope you have a... Continue reading

Found that the S-MIX chip at U10 has a little bit of a problem: visible physical damage. Might explain why there is no sound. It’s amazing what you can find when you really focus on the problem. Even still, it’s good to have new capacitors on there. I expected the... Continue reading

Here we have another original Xbox with a misbehaving DVD drive. This particular console is serial 206315452705, a revision 1.6B machine, and the disc tray doesn’t want to eject properly. Give the console a bump and sometimes it’ll open, but that’s hardly the most reliable method of getting a disc... Continue reading

Decided to swap some caps over on all three of the SNES units. Here’s two of them being done at the same time. 1CHIP is on the right. We eventually got them done, I ran out of “film” while recording because my camera needs a new, bigger SD card. These... Continue reading

I’ve got a collection of faulty original Xbox consoles here, most of them version 1.6 machines, and I’ve been having a go at getting a few of them working again. One even arrived with its casing smashed in the post. The joys of buying broken hardware! Two of the machines... Continue reading

Sadly, this repair did not have any success. The serial number of this unit was 02-27430367-2452398-CECHG02. However, stay tuned… we have some mighty successes coming up! I’d been working on an Xbox 360 with the dreaded red ring of death around the same time, so I thought I’d have a... Continue reading

This is my attempt to repair the RROD Xbox 360 from the earlier assessment. It did not work. I hope you, and me, can learn from my mistakes and see if you can repair yours with more success! I thought I’d try something a little different for this video, so... Continue reading

This will be the article on how to install SuperCIC for switchless region-free gaming. Provided I can find the time. The board I’m working with is an SNSP-CPU-1CHIP-01, featuring the PAL F413B lockout chip at U8. The idea is to install a SuperCIC and hopefully get around some of those... Continue reading

I’ve found dd extremely useful when dealing with older or otherwise inconvenient disk formats. This was particularly handy for Mac OS Standard / HFS media because OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard treated HFS as read-only. I also used it for Raspberry Pi media containing Linux filesystems that OS X did... Continue reading

Here in the outback it sure can get hot, even in the middle of winter! My DG834Gv5 was running hotter than I liked, so I added some extra cooling. Nothing particularly elegant, just a fan, a resistor and a little bit of plastic surgery. What could possibly go wrong? The... Continue reading

Here are the PAL switch settings and hardware notes I recorded from my Sega Saturn Sophia Programming Box. I originally called these the “factory settings”, but I have not established that they were universal PAL factory defaults. One useful troubleshooting note from the time: if no video appears, it may... Continue reading