Hi, I have an Power Clutch SG by Asciiware (also known as the Sega Mega Stick), a controller for the Sega Mega Drive. It's one of my favorite controllers.

Unfortunately my son dropped it a few years ago and snapped the joystick clean off. I have disassembled and removed the joystick. The snap is clean and the 2 parts fit together neatly. I'm looking for the best way to fix this. The joystick itself has no aftermarket alternatives as far as I can find, and buying another one of these to harvest the stick itself is an exercise in futilty as it would leave the other unit without a stick.

The big question is, what adhesive brand/type is best to bond these 2 parts together again? Especially considering the stress this might have to endure.

Hey there! Some months ago, I got myself a (first gen) XBOX with the intention of softmodding it. The console would boot up, but not read discs. As far as I remember, it did spin the discs at this point. There was no error message, it just skipped to the main menu after like a minute of trying to read them.

After some research on common issues I checked all resistor networks, which were fine, and went on to replacing the capacitors. I triple-checked to get the right values and place them in the correct orientation. For reference: I got the Samsung SDG-605 (non-B) as seen in this video.

I connected the ribbon cables, checked one final time that everything is in the correct place and put the drive back into the XBOX. Boots up, but this time I see the disc is not spinning. The motor seems fine, since every time the tray closes, I can see it make a quick quarter-turn. It just won't do anything further than that. Then, as usual, it gets me to the main XBOX menu after some waiting time.

What should I do? Ideally I'd like to just get another, known working drive, but I read that the drive's control board is "married" to the mainboard and I'd have to swap it over in case of a replacement. Which seems risky, as this very board seems the most likely culprit. I'd also like to avoid to spend a hundred bucks for a whole new used XBOX. All this is especially frustrating as I only need the damn drive once to get the initial exploit working.

Hi all!

I have a few gameboy carts where the PCBs are wrecked with corrosion or in one case it looks like someone took steel wool to the contacts. I suspect the chips are still OK though so I’d like to source some new PCBs if I can so I can swap over the rom chips. Hoping someone knows a source for such a thing.

Specifically, I’d be looking for: DMG-BEAN-01, DMG-BEAN-01, and DMG-GCA-01.

Thanks!

So after the volume was fixed I discovered the board . Turns out there were multiple issues. First the charge led was dead (tested with multimeter in diode mode) so that is swapped out with a blue one. Then EM8 needed a reflow to get a good connection across. The final issue was a bad trace under the cartridge slot from F2 to D1. For that I added the bodge wire seen in the photo.

Picked up a fairly cheap sp that had lots of corrosion on metal parts (power switch, charge port, and volume slider). After cleaning it all up and replacing the volume slider and audio cap, it still had low volume.Turns out there was a broken trace between the volume pad and the U6 (There should be continuity from the via I solder to, over to the via right next to the s in SW11). Adding the bodge fix the issue.

All the soldering was straight forward on this one. Just used j-tip iron with leaded plus lots of flux. The one pin that was partially corroded had enough left, so it only has to be bent back.

Hello,

so my old PS4 (Gen 1, I think, not a huge console person, it's my Bloodborne machine and nothing else) has an issue: it turns off after about 5 minutes of it being on, and when it reboots, it goes to safe mode, does some scans, boots and it happens again within 5 minutes.

At first I thought it was a heating issue or the old HDD breaking down, so I cleaned it thoroughly and replaced HDD with a new SSD. Issue did not go away, so in the name of troubleshooting, I blew cold air into it while it was on, but the exact same thing happened again. Have also reinstalled the OS clean when I swapped to the SSD, didn't do any cloning shenanigans.

Currently my theory is either the main board or PSU that's broken. One other idea I had was that the thermal compound has gone bad on CPU/GPU, but haven't tried replacing that yet, it seemed unlikely to be the issue after I increased the cooling temporarily, should have at least seen an increase in the time it stayed on by my logic.

I have another PS4 I found for free on second hand market app, seller said the PSU broke and is missing, but main board should work fine.

I've been googling this every once in a while, but haven't found any clear answers. I also took some measurements from the connectors, and they seem to give correct voltages, but haven't checked current, and haven't done any long term measurement when it shuts down, so no clue if it's a voltage spike or undervoltage that causes this issue. My oscilloscope is also out of commision, so that complicates any long term measurements.

Does this kind of issue ring a bell for everyone? Any further troubleshooting tips? Should I just plug the PSU into the other PS4 without a PSU and see if the same thing happens? Doesn't 100% rule out the mainboard being the issue, since I have no idea if the mainboard is a known good component on the spare part one either...

I'd really like to finish my Bloodborne perfectionist run some day :)

I bought a PSP 2000 (yuck) from a friend that had no battery.

The battery took ages to arrive, and when it did, everything was fine for about 20 minutes, then the screen developed vertical lines.

The image isnt mine, its from a YouTube video, but its the exact same issue.

Does anyone know a fix? Some one suggested an LCD replacement.

Definitely a donor board, the other side was worse (you can see the power switch to the right, it just fell off).

Had to replace this ribbon connector to get the drive working reliability again. It probably could have used a little more solder but everything is solid so I'm not messing with it further.

Hi there, first post here.

I found a Sega Mega Drive in our basement and am working on restoring it. It turns on, but I have no audio or video.

I never used a cartridge-driven console before, so I want to make sure this is not user error. I need to plug in the cartridge before turning on the console, and then there should be a boot screen and eventually the game.

Is it possible for the contacts to be too dirty to allow reading the cartridges?

And then lastly, I had a peek into the maintenance manual I may need to exchange hardware parts. Should I need to; do you know any trustworthy sellers in the EU that could have parts compatible with the Mega Drive? I have been looking for a 53.2034 MHz +/-20ppm oscillater since it could be faulty, but couldn't find any shop that had one with that odd of a MHz frequency.

Any advice is appreciated. :)

Edit: Thank you all for your comments. On further inspection the contacts on the Mega Drive's cartridge-slot were oxidized. A little bit of sand paper did the trick. :)

I need a replacement for the white plastic socket that the usb/charge board plugs in to. I used hot air to pull out a drifting stick but that also heated and fell off, and of absolutely fucking course, fell into the floor air vent and went on a grand old slippy slide away.

Does anyone know the actual name for this part? Everything I have tried searching so far is apparently wrong

Some background, I originally removed the chips from the board on the left for a Pocket Color Build. It's original fault was no power, which turned out to be a dirty power switch and corroded battery contacts.

The new board had signs of corrosion under the solder mask and previous work (bent ram pins and bridges on the cpu). I decided to move the chips on the other instead of trying to restore the traces. Soldering all went well, until my hand slipped while testing if the connections were solid. One of the pins (bottom left) is pretty bent and the pad on the end was partially lifted.

I was able to heat all those back up and confirm no bridges and the pads are connected. Booted up a quick game to test a screen, sounds and all the buttons. Everything is working.

Moral of the story, be careful and don't put too much pressure on those pins.

So I've mostly fixed up a 3DS picked up off eBay.

The last issue is an odd one. On boot it acts as though Dpad down is being held, the odd part is it only does this for about 5 seconds after boot, then stops and acts perfectly normal the rest of the time it's been booted. It's always about 5 seconds with or without any interaction

Once powered off and on it does it again.

The big problem though is if I boot to gm9 it won't stop and I suspect it is causing a freeze issue when attempting to execute a script

Anybody know what's up? I've already cleaned the pads with isopropyl

This was my first attempt doing a trace repair on a HDMI port. Seems like everything seems to be working after replacing those caps as well. Played through the tutorial of gears 5 with no issues.

What I've tested:

1. Playing downloaded game
2. Playing a Blu-ray
3. Playing on a 4k TV and 1440 monitor. This one the auto detect preferred 120hz 1080p but manually selecting resolution works great.

What I've learned:

1. Wired all the pads before soldering the port. I attached the front wires after the port was soldered. Should have just done them all.
2. A cheap grinding pen is so much easier to use than a knife to expose the traces.
3. 0201 are very hard to work with.

Picked up this Series X to do a trace repair for the hdmi, turns out 2 caps were ripped off the board as well. The one was still partially connected and easy to bodge. The second circled is missing. I'm curious if anyone knows the replacement value.

The similar caps in the area all read between 18.6 to 19.6 uf when out of circuit, so it could be a few values (though no guarantee this cap wasn't unique and completely different).

I have a nice pink (slim) PS2 with a broken optical drive that I’m trying to fix. I have a replacement drive that has an identical code to the broken one and that visually looks identical except that one of the ribbon cables is longer. I put it in following the instructions from iFixit, but the new drive does not seem to spin up (though it does move the read head, it sound like).

I put the old drive back and try again, with the same result. This is surprising because the previous drive could read CDs (PS1 games) but not DVDs, so I fixed it worse than it was before.

Does anyone have suggestions for where to start troubleshooting? What could have possibly gone wrong to cause this?

I recently replaced power connectors on two DSi XLs. Both couldn’t charge, and one worked on the battery while the other didn’t. I replaced the connectors and a dead charging circuit fuse on one of them (only one dead fuse).

Now both are dead, and one only has an orange flashing light like the power fuse is burnt when plugged in, while the other is just … no life.

New Power connectors all beep out just fine for continuity. All fuses beep out just fine. All ribbon cables are seated.

What the hell did I do or fail to do? Any guesses? My soldering was accurate, no stray touches, etc. Just wondering if there’s a common other issue that I might have overlooked beyond power connector & fuse replacement.

I have a DSi that is in very good condition but for the right shoulder button. It does work but I have to press very hard to get it to register. The "lift up the button and blow into it" does actually improve the function of the button for a bit (I use canned air, not moist mouth) but it doesn't take long at all to NOT work either. Does anyone have a REAL solution that actually works short of disassembly and replacement of the button?

This gameboy was gifted to me from a Family member who found it one day in their Attic. I've tried fixing it a year ago, but since some parts never got delivered, it kinda slipped out of my mind until now.

The main thing I've replaced where the crusty green battery Contacts, but it did not seem to help with the original issue.

Upon turning it on, a bunch of stripes appear and then quickly disappear. Sometimes the whole screen is stripes, sometimes only 1-3. With disappearing I mean that they oddly seem to disintegrate in a very unnatural way. Its less pixels turning off, more like a liquid esc thing if I had to describe it.

How fast they stay and start disintegrating is dependent on how high the contrast is set, with it all the way up causing them to go almost instantly. With the contrast all the way down, on very rare occasions, I can see a corrupted Nintendo Logo like in the picture like its trying its best to start.

I only got 1 Game to test it all. The Motherboard inside looks a bit rough with the big metal thing in the middle looking a bit rusty. The screen board looks pretty good tho. I could not locate any leaking Capacitors, but some hard brown goo could be found sometimes. With all of that said, I can't pinpoint if this is a Motherboard or screen issue, so I'm not sure which to try and replace, do any of you folks have any suggestions? Thanks

Hello fellow friends of Console Repair!

Today I'd like to ask for some ideas about an old Game Gear (the first one I ever recapped) as it is showing the "red light for one second and off" issue.

Basically, as this was my first attempt (and a successful one) at recovering a Game Gear, I knew I did not clean the board too well or properly removed solder before changing caps, so when I saw the issue, I removed all the caps, cleaned the board and changed the caps again for good measure. Still, the issue is still there.

So here is my fruit of my troubleshooting afterwards:

1. the voltages from the power board are correct (I tested as well with the working power board of another VA0 I have around, no change). And all the capacitors are of the correct value and polarity.

2. the issue seems related to the VBat circuit as I observed that:

• R50 receives around 13V from the power board, which seems the rough amount expected when powering from the wall adapter.
• R50 ends with just 0.90V - however, removing the resistor (it's a 9.1K one), and testing with a multimeter, provides 9.01K, which is good enough, and definitely not something that would kill the voltage that much
• as we get 0.90V from R50, the other resistors just reduce the voltage even more. I removed R51 and R52 and they both tested well on the multimeter (2.98K for the 3K one and 1.09K for the 1.1K one).

3. I thought that the diode D4 might be faulty and replaced it, but in reality it seems it was just dirt, anyway, it's a new one now...

4. VRef at the power board outputs 1.26, but it arrives to the ASIC as 0.30V.

5. Finally, as part of the troubleshooting, I noticed that removing C49, the system works fine... After the removal of C49 all the voltages that were too low becomes higher, in line with the ones of the other working Game Gear.

So here my doubts that I hope someone might help me clarify:

1. What could affect VRef as in principle is directly connected from the power board to the ASIC? Following the schematics here, I don't see anything that should interact with the circuit, modify the current. Still, the removal of C49 normalizes the voltage to around 1.25V...

2. what could be the reason why the voltage drops when the capacitor C49 is installed?

I think it might be useful to share a couple of pictures of the relevant parts of the board, but I can share more, if needed.

This unit was just sold as a parts board. I bought it to use as a donor board but figured I could get it working first (this screen was from a different unit). Turns out someone had opened the power switch to clean it, but somehow a solder blob made it into the switch. That was jamming the power switch. Still a donor board through, the volume slider is pretty rusty.

I can't press any of the buttons and get a response from it

I have a "Professional control pad PRO-2" (this one https://segaretro.org/Konix_Power_Pad), but unfortunately it does not work.

When I open it up and toy with the contacts I can get all the buttons to work at the same time, and indefinitely, by bridging the start button contact with a single piece of metal. The 3 lights will go on and stay on, and the game will keep receiving start repeatedly. I have tested this with Virtua Racing, it will start the game, go through all menus and then when the race starts it will pause and continue repeatedly. When I touch both sides of the start button contact with a multimeter it does nothing.

I don't know much about electronics, but I would like to repair this controller.

Here are pictures of the inside of the controllers.

https://imgur.com/a/WTQsCIt

I'm not seeing anything wrong, and the capacitors don't look leaky, but I could replace them. How can I best proceed?

My hand slipped while disassembling the system (original goal was to replace shoulder buttons and plastic housing). I had to scrape away points on the board and use some 32 awg enameled wire to recreate the connections. Good news is every fits and is back in working order.