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PC Engine Repair & Servicing
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31-05-2022 3:11pm#1
So I imported a PC Engine there a few weeks/months ago, and upon testing it, it was stone cold dead...not a peep out of it at power up, not even a white screen. At the time I suspected the internal fuse, which are known to blow on these from time to time, so I set about ordering up the few bits & pieces I'd like to replace. I figured I'd add a fuse holder, rather than soldering in/out fuses each time. I also bought a new voltage regulator, and a cap kit. They all arrived recently, so I set aside some spare time today to see if I could bring it back to life.
^^ Bog standard white PC Engine....exactly what I wanted. I really like the PC Engine system as a whole, it's a little powerhouse.
Voltage regulators, replacement fuses, fuse holders, and cap kit.
The fuse sits soldered to the mainboard, directly under the voltage regulator's heatsink. Kinda hard to tell at a glance if it's blown or not, so a quick check check with the multimeter confirmed it was indeed blown.
Macro mode photo shows the blown filament.
Heatsink removed, and it's much easier to visually inspect.
Original voltage regulator. These are known to be troublesome, and they run quite hot...necessitating the large heatsink just removed. I wanted to replace it with one of these to replace it with - https://www.mouser.co.uk/ProductDetail/Murata-Power-Solutions/OKI-78SR-5-15-W36HE-C?qs=AQlKX63v8Ru%252BEtbp1ey3tw%3D%3D - but as can be seen, they're like hens teeth, and back ordered until July 2023! I'll grab one when the world catches up with itself...
This is a nice new L78S05CV regulator - this is a more modern/efficient version of the original, and should run cooler and happier too.
Fuse and voltage regulator removed...
New part's legs should be bent to match the original one, as it lines up with a screw hole and small metal plate for heat transfer.
The legs of the fuse holder were slightly too wide to fit through the PCB's via. So a I snipped them width ways ever so slightly, and they now fit like a glove.
All nicely fitting, and all soldered up. Next up was the cap kit itself.
Decapped the whole board first (making sure the kit was a perfect match before doing so). It's just much quicker this way rather than doing it one by one.
Hellraiser vibes off this one!
Not forgetting the small cap on the Hu-Card reader too.
All done with the regular caps.
The kit comes with two tiny surface mount caps, to correct a slight capacitance problem that can lead to jailbars on screen. These are properly small little things, so an anti-static tweezers comes in very handy here to manoeuvre the cap while you tack it at one end.
Removed via heat gun, and cleaned up using wick.
They're tiny, even smaller than the original ones. So you need to add enough solder to ensure the capacitor meets the pads.
Bath time.
It works! Chuffed to see this screen.
Now, I had an even bigger test lined up. A while back I bought a PC Engine CD-Rom unit from Japan, sold as faulty. The laser slider was freely sliding along the worm gear, so it wouldn't read discs. I was able to repair this, so the worm gear could move the lens unit along (No pics of this unfortunately, I done it a few months ago.) I'd no way to test it was reading/working other than an audio cd, which did work, so I was quietly hopeful it would work. To properly check though, I needed a Super CD-Rom card.
^^ I nabbed this from eBay for a decent price. I was going to splash a bit more on the Super Arcade card, but looking at the games themselves, there was little there to justify the significantly higher cost for me. So this one will do perfectly.
It works!
It powers up and switches to the correct mode...
I bought this cheap game called Verbatim, not sure what it is tbh, can't find much online about it...maybe it's some type of edu-tainment language game?
My God, it's full of stars! Couldn't be happier to have a working PC Engine setup. I used to own a Duo-R but never really 'bonded' with it (I'm not a huge fan of all-in-one machines that have their addons built in.) This feels immediately (and completely subjectively of course) nicer to me.
All that's left is to RGB mod the briefcase unit, and patiently wait for Krizz to get back on his feet. I'll nab an Everdrive from him at some stage, and possibly even the next-gen PC Engine Everdrive that can load cd-images too. All in good time!
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