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Repairathon - Blitzquig Edition
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01-07-2024 10:14am#1
So @Quigs Snr sent me a handful of handhelds to take a look at, all with various issues. Rather than a separate thread for each, I thought I'd just make one thread & blitz through the repairs all together. Let's crack on…
^^ What awaits us….
^^ Of course, the quintessential handheld repair….the Sega Game Gear…
^^ The problem is, we have game audio but no screen/image. It'll be either dead capacitors, corroded traces from leaking capacitors, and/or a dead lcd unit.
^^ A ceramic capacitor repair kit, the most sensible place to start really.
^^ All original caps. No huge corrosion issues, but plenty of suspicious looking via's. The fact the game is running though is a good sign, as the issue will be localised to the display area.
^^ Heat gun decapped, all pads refluxed, resoldered, and the wicked clean with solder braid. This leaves them very clean & fresh for new caps.
^^ New cap time….I enjoy fitting these as they're so neat & tidy when installed. Soldering in through-hole caps to Game Gears is a real chore, bending and cutting legs to fit etc…these ceramic ones make it a breeze.
^^ They're a little therapeutic to fit actually, once all the dirty cleaning & prep work is done.
^^ Speaking of dirty prep work….the sound board here, all caps heat gunned off….the flux I put on has discoloured from the heat. These look ok, and should clean up nicely.
^^ You can see the corrosive crud forming on the trace here from C5. With some fresh solder, and a solder wick pass, this will hopefully remove and not break.
^^ Mint. Just a tad more flux to clean away.
^^ Perfect….that sorts the mainboard and a the sound board….just the power board next….
^^ Done. These are usually a lot easier given they use through hole capacitors, so they weren't affected the 'the plague.'
Time to test…..aaaannnndddd, predictably, nothing….no backlight on the screen at all this time. Hmm, I've made it worse somehow (HATE when this happens.)
^^ What the hell is this, and where did it come from?? I'm as baffled as you are. It LOOKS like the conductor what comes out of the side of the lcd unit, but doesn't seem to be as that's in place on both sides.
^^ I desolder the light element in order to allow me to lift up the bulb….
^^ It's definitely the same type of wire & twist as the wire that runs to the bulb (seen at the very end of the filament above), but where this came from I've no idea. Wherever the hell it came from, caused the screen fuse to blow too. I've no spare fuses for these, but given I've no removed the short, it should be ok to bypass the fuse for testing…
^^ Fuse bypassed…
^^ Screen back lighting up, but alas, no image still. I suspect the LCD unit itself is toast, and I'll recommend a modern LCD replacement from here.
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^^ Wadyaknow, a second Game Gear. Problem evident by the label, let's have a look inside…
^^ Original caps, and these ones are a little more corroded/leaky. I recapped the whole board, much the same as the previous GG above (no point showing the same thing again.)
^^ The problem of no sound is a no brainer here…the original caps have predictably leaked and are no longer functioning correctly.
^^ From filth to function (hopefully.) These pads cleaned up ok, not beautifully, but all the crud was removed and fresh solder applied. It should sort it for many many years to come with any luck.
^^ Power board recapped also, so that's the whole unit recapped. Time to test!
^^ Success. As you can tell here, the sound works perfectly now. The screen isn't hugely improved, but it's as good as any original Game Gear screen I've seen. This one is now fully restored.
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^^ Well the cat(s) are outta the bag here, two rare kittens indeed. One donor Atary Lynx, and another Atari Lynx that's in dire need of attention.
^^ The Lynx we're hoping to fix here, it's got several big issues. The screen is failed, the sound/volume is barely audible, and it's missing the lower A button on the bottom right.
^^ A care package if I've ever seen one. The Lynx Clean Screen Kit from Retro Six, a full capacitor kit, a power stage repair kit, and a new button membrane.
^^ This cat has been worked on before, and these signs always worry me when I'm about to start a repair. The battery terminal was obviously torn from the pcb in the past, and the springs have been manually soldered to the remnants of the trace. I'll leave this be, as it is working, and no sense messing with it. These things are beyond fickle, and I don't want to touch anything I don't have to.
^^ Mainboard removed, and time to get to work. I took this pic as a reference for the caps. The new ones are notably taller than the old ones, and may need to be bent into the above shape to fit back in the shell. As a result, I'll leave the legs on the new caps in place, and only cut them off when I've adjusted the caps correctly (as adjusting them may necessitate longer/shorter legs.)
^^ Further evidence of work done in the past. This diode (and the R74 resistor) are not factory.
^^ The caps are all factor though, and the joints on the right most cap shown here are getting quite dull…I suspect the very early stages of leakage, so it's nice to catch them now before any harm is done.
^^ Decapped, cleaned, and recapped. All the new caps are now positioned into place, and I'm happy to cut the legs off of them now on the other side.
^^ The original speaker is fried (established by a test later on, so I came back to this afterwards….showing it now though for the same of a smooth procedure.) This can happen if someone plugs a DC jack into the headphone port apparently, so I imagine this what happened in this place.
^^ I swapped the original leads over onto the new speaker…
^^ …and then fit the new speaker into the shell (a slightly tight fit, but it does fit.)
^^ Next is the power stage repair kit. I'm going to swap out all five components from the kit, so I know it's all new components going in. The five components are arrowed above, a mosfet, two transistors, a diode, and a resistor. The kapton tape is to protect adjacent components from the heat of the hot air gun.
^^ All five components removed, and pads wicked clean ready for the new parts to be installed.
^^ Done. The new parts take beautifully to the pads provided they're cleaned properly. This means less contact time with the soldering iron needed, and happier tiny components as a result.
^^ I couldn't in good conscience fit a modern new screen to this unit and leave all that crud under the lens. I removed the lens, and gave it all a good soak in warm water, before cleaning with a q-tip.
^^ New/reproduction membrane installed. It seems fractionally big, but all the important bits line up.
^^ Donor button scavenged from the for-parts Lynx. These are very slightly different shapes to one another depending on where they go in the shell, I never knew that & assumed they were all the same shape (they're not!) So making sure to pick the exact match here before moving on'
^^ Voltage inductor removed. This is only needed for the old CFL tube, and delivers quite a potent punch. As it's not needed anymore, the advice is to remove it.
^^ It's Clean Screen time. I can see straight away, the 3D printed bracket is for a Lynx 1, and there's no additional ribbons provided here (one is essential, the other is not.)
^^ As luck would have it for Quigs, I have all three of the missing bits here (my own Lynx II is awaiting me to find time to do the screen kit on it.) Lynx II bracket (grey) and the two missing ribbons.
^^ Screen in place. It's held very snugly by the printed bracket, and then the Clean Screen board screws through the bracket & into the shell.
^^ Screen looking lovely and clean here, and we're ready to test…
^^ Boom! It works….sorta….there's two problems….#1 is the buttons aren't working at all, and #2 is the unit won't power on via the DC jack (only batteries.)
^^ After MUCH troubleshooting, it appears the ribbon receiver port on the Clean Screen board itself isn't an exact match for the pitch on the membrane connector. This would have been nice to know on the product page. So with some very slight trimming of the ribbon connector, it gives some freedom for lateral positioning into the port. Once positioned, I check all pins for continuity, and after a few adjustments I've got full connection.
^^ This brings all buttons back to life, and as can be seen here, there's hotkeys than can be pressed to enter the screen menu to display different effects etc. These are the vertical scanlines, there are others like grid effect and horizontal ones. Honestly the screen is that nice I'm not sure I'd bother with them. At this small size, the bare pixels look great.
^^ For the DC power problem, I traced the problem to a break in this coil. It had a leg sitting off of the board, and DC power was unable to travel past it. This break was under a dag of ancient hot glue, but I found with by probing for where the voltage stopped on the board.
^^ Screen sorted, sound sorted, controls sorted, button sorted, DC power sorted….all sorted!
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Last out of the box then….
^^ Another uncommon beast, the Sega Nomad!
^^ Before even powering this on, the screen looks like it has begun internally leaking.
^^ Lets test with an official battery pack & game.
^^ Terminal screen issues. This one will need something a lot more modern…
^^ Enter the LCDDRV from an AliExpress seller. The 3D printed screen mount isn't part of the kit, and is something I advised Quigs to pick up to save manual screen positioning.
^^ Uh oh, someone's gunthered out the gamebit screw previously. I hope there's no butchery waiting for me inside the unit.
^^ Thankfully, it looks quite minty inside.
^^ The original caps in place, they all look perfectly fine so at this stage, we don't need to worry about them. It might be worth replacing them down the line, but for now, they're good to go.
^^ We need to get this screen out, which is more or less the point of no return with the Nomad.
^^ We're done. Screen out, just need to clean the pads where it was connected to now.
^^ Done. Fluxed, resoldered, and solder braided to shinyness. One pad came away, but A) we don't need it anymore, and B) It's a redundant pad anyway, not connected to anything.
^^ This isn't a leaky cap, it's been glued down from the factory.
^^ Old lens removed, housing cleaned with IPA, and brand new lens in place.
^^ The LCDDRV kit, complete with coloured wire, screen, driver board, and insulation sheet.
^^ The printed mount is, unfortunately, for a different screen with a bigger housing. As a result, this thinner screen slides around in the mount. Balls, back to the old fashioned way of mounting the screen so…
^^ Double sided tape in place as per instructions. This doesn't have to be perfect, just in-line with the picture.
^^ 'Mounting Sticks' in place next…
^^ Screen in place now…
^^ Driver board in place…
^^ Next up, we've to remove some resistors…
^^ All four resistors removed…
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^^ Bridge wire in place as per the guide.
^^ LCDDRV wired as per the guide…
^^ Nomad mainboard wired now as per guide (really messy wiring at this stage, but I've learned over the years not to bother tidying it until it's all tested!
^^ Back of the LCDDRV insulated with kapton tape…
^^ Capacitative sensor taped into place just above the d-pad on the top of the shell. Time to reassemble and test!
^^ Oh it's looking good…
Beautiful, back to working operation!
^^ My phone doesn't do it justice, but the RGB screen looks fantastic in person.
^^ This isn't misalignment, it's overscan and very normal as I understand.
^^ Enjoy Quigs!
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The Lynx was in bad shape, was glad to be able to get it back in business.
^^ I seen this when I removed the original screen. Somebody really gave this a good go, it's janky but pretty good level soldering here. New screen all the way though, it really looks great now.
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The initial Game Gear above that I couldn't get working, there was a hail mary chance for it…Remember the Saga Game Gear thread? Well I'd a Clean Screen v2 board left over from that, so @Quigs Snr bought an LCD screen for it and some new quick solder ribbons.
^^ A Lazarus moment here, perfectly working with a new modern screen in it, and this was destined to be a parts machine! Delighted it's fixed, and that sorts all four machines in this thread - a nice success rate! Shame they're not always like this!
Post edited by Inviere on4 -
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