Category: Repair

Status: Successfully repaired on January 10, 2024 In for repair was a Capcom CPS3 board with original SIMMs and the Darksoft UltraBIOS cart that removes the need for a suicide battery in the cartridge. The board exhibited graphical glitching. The onboard diagnostics flagged the Sprite RAM as the culprit. Note that it’s normal for SIMM…

Status: Repaired successfully on 6/7/2023 In for repair is a Capcom CPS1 arcade board with the Marqs HDMI mod already installed. The HDMI display output had an unusual issue – it would look fine during gameplay, but anytime the screen transitioned with a fade in or fade out, mid-transition the fade would “pop” to full…

Status: Successfully repaired on 5/24/2023 I didn’t take as many pictures of this repair as I should have – sorry about that! In for repair was a CPS1 main board with no sound. First, I tested the B + C board on another CPS1 main board.  The sound worked fine there, so the sound issue…

Status: Ongoing. Diagnosis began on 4/9/2023. I got a good deal on a Guwange board because it was malfunctioning with both background tile and sprite corruption. The board itself looked clean at first appearances, but close examination showed plenty of leftover flux around the large SMD customs from a previous repair attempt. These boards are…

Status: Repaired Successfully on 2/14/2023 In for repair is a Sega System 16B with the Multi ROM board created by Apocalypse. The main PCB was a Tetris board originally, and the board is clean and in good condition. However, it booted up to Altered Beast with severe graphical corruption and no sound. First, I physically…

Status: Complete This fix was so simple that it barely counts as a “repair”, but the symptoms look scary, so it’s worth writing up anyway for The Public Good. I purchased a Salamander 2 sub-board for a Konami GX main board that I’d picked up a few months previously. When powering it on for the…

Status: Completed Successfully on 2/28/2023 In for repair is a front-loading NES with NESRGB mod that no longer outputs a picture. The console power light comes on, so I opened it up to have a look. At first glance, everything looks fine, but looking closer at the PPU … The PPU looks burnt and melted…

Status: Successfully repaired on 2/25/2021 I purchased an inexpensive Sega System 16 board with the game Ryu Kyu to use as a donor for the Apocalypse System 16 Multi game solution. Unfortunately something was wrong with the sound effects hardware – they played with a crackling screeching sound. I connected an audio probe and started…

Status: Successfully repaired on 9/8/2022 In for repair was a TurboGrafx-16 console with the TurboGrafx-CD attachment. The TurboGrafx console functioned correctly with card games but the CDROM wouldn’t power on – attempting to boot with the Super System 3 CD card would hang on a white screen. First I checked the CDROM unit’s power supply.…

Status: Successfully repaired on October 29, 2021 In for repair was a Capcom CPS3 arcade board that had a Marqs HDMI mod installed by a prior technician. The board would no longer boot up. First, I tried removing the HDMI mod board installation. The board booted up successfully and worked fine without it, so the…