Category: Repair

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…

Status: Successfully repaired on 1/15/2019 I got a discount on a Konami Aliens arcade PCB because voice samples don’t work. The voice samples are driven by a 007232 custom IC. Schematics for this board are available, so I was able to probe the appropriate lines and confirm that the custom wass receiving proper inputs but…

Status: Repaired successfully on 5/6/2019 I got a discount on a Toaplan FixEight arcade board because the controls weren’t functional. The controls on many second-generation Toaplan arcade boards run through a HK-1000 ceramic custom chip. Unfortunately the ceramic becomes fragile over time and cracks easily – that’s what happened here in the upper-left corner. Fortunately,…

Status: Failed on 1/5/2020. Console is now a parts donor. I owned a launch day 20 GB Sony PlayStation 3 where the cooling fan was starting to run on high speed all the time. Cleaning the heat sink and replacing the heat sink thermal compound didn’t resolve the issue. Research revealed that the thermal compound…