Handheld Hijinks Vol 5 - Decap Attack (Sega Game Gear)
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30-03-2023 1:42pm#1
Another day, another repair thread (they'll be pausing soon, I promise!)
I recapped a previously borked Game Gear a few months back (correction, a year ago!)...posts here and here, showing it being brought back to life. I did mention in the second post though, that I hate fitting through hole caps in place of smd caps....it's a clunky, janky job, and aesthetically never sits right with me. Time to remedy that one, courtesy of a cap kit from Retro Six. This is their ceramic capacitor kit, and is a much much simpler affair to install (there's only three values you use, depending on where they're being fit on the board.) They're quite a bit smaller than the through hole cap kits you'll see being sold, so an anti static tweezers is a must here.
^^ The Game Gear in question.
^^ A quick test to make sure it's working, before I work on it. It works, and the screen is out and out 90's fuzz.
^^ Through hole caps from the old kit soldered and bent into place. As far as this type of kit goes, this isn't a bad effort at keeping it neat to be fair, but I still don't like it.
^^ The power board I can happily leave in place, the caps are decent Nichicon ones from the old kit, and these caps are designed to be through-hole ones, so I'll skip right by this board.
^^ The audio board though, well that's a different story. Hideous....functional, but hideous.
^^ Just to show, this is a twin ASIC model, so there's only x11 caps on the main board to handle. Some Game Gears have a single ASIC in this location, and they've one extra cap (plus they're laid out slightly differently.)
^^ Old caps removed. I'll keep them for 'just in-case' reasons as they're relatively new, with nearly zero hours on them too.
^^ Solder blobs remain on the main board, so they'll need to be desoldered and the pads cleaned down.
^^ Done, all pads cleaned and prepped.
^^ The RetroSix capacitor kit. The caps are pretty small, but not magnifying glass small thankfully.
^^ A Game Gear screw for size comparison....these are the 100's, 10's and 1's in descending order.
^^ Two of the x10's in place. Loving how tiny and neat they are.
^^ More can be seen here. With a tweezers and a fine tipped soldering iron bit, they're quite straight forward to install. You can plough through the whole kit in a few minutes really.
^^ Fully recapped, looking very neat and tidy. I'm happy with the results.
^^ Next up is the audio board. You've to remove the metal shield to remove the sub-board.
^^ Old caps desoldered, pads cleaned off, and board cleaned down with IPA. The pads aren't exactly pretty, but that's due to the damage from the original electrolytic caps leaking their crud all over them. Nothing some fresh solder won't clean up anyway.
^^ Done. So much neater. Some of the gaps between pads are quite wide compared to the new ceramic caps, so you've to position them carefully and center them as much as possible.
^^ The reassembly begins...
^^ Ok, we're ready for testing...
^^ Nice, the new caps seem to be doing the job very nicely. The case went back together very easily, and no pressure at all was needed to close the Game Gear back up.
I had read these ceramic caps weren't ideal for the audio circuit, as the electrolytic caps would produce a better sound output. Having tested both, if there's a difference (which I couldn't notice), then it's so minute that the benefits of the ceramic caps outweigh the electrolytic ones (in my opinion anyway.)
That's it, another console finished. I've one more planned possibly for next week, just waiting on a part. Then my threads might have to pause for a few months while I direct for focus to other more important things for a little bit!
Just for completion, here's the RetroSix install guide for the caps where you can get a better idea of how they're installed (installation begins at about ~15mins in or so)
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