Vince's Ebay Repair Thread - (Console Repairs & Mods)

Thats handy as the Lynx was a send in :) Its a bit ropey on power and the screen is grim! We shall mod a lynx tonight! Least that way it can go back to its owner tomorrow! Last night I fixed a GG! Just gave it a quick recap and screen is good so buttoned it up with a new lense and called it done. I might go mad and mod all of these and just stack em up to all be listed at the same time - We shall see!
 
pingwing said:
Agreed on the Lynx though the Pokémon gameboy shells are very cool!
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Lynx it is then... so on the lynx we are changing..

ZD1 (zenner diode)
Q11 - Main power Fet,
q4 and q13 main power line transistors
r56 (resistor on main power rail)

We will then remove the 34v rail and its current dc converter board as well as all the old cathode ray tube screen etc, fit up the LCD, new lense and have ourselves a grand old time... Was a bit disappointed as the Lynx mk1 has a tendency to get long screw damaged on the front case when baboons take them apart and attempt to put them back together. This one is sadly no exception and has a damaged front case which is almost impossible to find or repair nicely. So it will be a nicely modded lynx but with a sub par case. But unlike everything else you see here it isn't my console so I shall just do what im being asked to do and mod it!
 
OK first let's spam some pics then I'll go back over the post and give context.

Started testing the Lynx as i do before I work on any console that is sent to me and some things of note, it wouldn't at all work on batteries, so I connected the battery terminals to my bench supply and she is getting very hot and drawing 2 amps... thats wrong, cant get it to boot at all from battery terminals, I'm told it will boot eventually on the AC adapter so next i jerry rig the AC side and finally get it to boot once. But only once in probably 50 attempts... Lets pick up following the testing...

Right so opened her up and immediately this is what we have, a dc jack massacre. The jack is the incorrect jack and is glued to the board with 3 wires running from the jack down a via to the through hole pads below. more on this later as it comes back to bite us... Anyway....



This is the screws holding it together. Two original screws missing...



The parts to rebuild power circuit so we may as well start here...



Main fet, we will replace this:



And this transistor:



This resistor



the zenner:



And this bad last transistor here:



Eventually we will also remove this and a load of other parts but first lets rebuild the power circuit and see if we can't get it booting and reading games consistently first!



Power circuit removed...



New power circuit installed :)



And this is where it gets interesting, fired it up, same issue, so decided to investigate further. First things first, the lynx power circuit is almost the same as the game gear and fundamentally there is a switch in the dc jack that when you insert the jack it disconnects the battery circuit so you don't get the batteries getting power when the AC is connected because you will almost certainly have a bad time anyway the glue blocked the switch but also the jack was wired up wrong so the switch was effectively on the wrong side of the jack. I'll try and find a schematic so I can explain better. Anyway removed it all the glue and the bodge wires and soldered some wires directly to the Lynx jack side and success, she boots first time every time.







This is probably the worst screen ive ever seen on a lynx, there is something wrong with the resistor array that feeds the contrast wheel which means its only settings are bright and stupidly bright but that's fine because im going to rip out and disconnect the contrast wheel from its resistors and wire the mod directly to the pot you will see what I mean later. Really all we needed to do first is get it working and booting consistently, now we have that we can get the parts we need and continue with our mod.

This is where we leave it tonight, we need a new proper DC jack, not some bodge. Then once we have the new jack in we can test the battery side etc, make sure it isn't drawing crazy amps... fwiw those amps seem to go directly to the suzy co-processor (suzy is a sprite co-processor that can do crazy things with sprites, properly ahead of its time I might add and leagues ahead of say the game gear in terms of capability) she also isn't easily available so we really don't want to be frying her. we really want to fix this issue before we move on with the mod :)
 
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New Charger for the Asus got here today. Not overly cheap sadly but worth it to see if its some sort of smart supply. Means I can now massacre the old broken supply and have a look at it. Can also test the dc jack on the rog now, what is it with things and DC/AC jack issues.
 
iron_monkey said:
Hey Vince, love your work here dude. Do you do work on nintendo switches? My nephew has broken his, its totally dead, wont charge or work while plugged in. Hopefully something simple like a broken charge port.
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Check back my dude, switches are my speciality :) I've done a lot of our members switches, mostly things like BSOD / no power / SD issues you name it ive probably seen it. I would hazard a guess at having fixed possibly something like 400+ switches :) There are a huge number of things that can cause no power from the simple to the complex common issues are PMIC, BMIC, PI3, port, fuel gauge, on super heavily used systems the nand can also eventually give up the ghost - Fix rate on switches is probably 90% ish.
 
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Vince said:
Check back my dude, switches are my speciality :) I've done a lot of our members switches, mostly things like BSOD / no power / SD issues you name it ive probably seen it. I would hazard a guess at having fixed possibly something like 400+ switches :) There are a huge number of things that can cause no power from the simple to the complex common issues are PMIC, BMIC, PI3, port, fuel gauge, on super heavily used systems the nand can also eventually give up the ghost - Fix rate on switches is probably 90% ish.
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Awesome i'll have a word with his mum and dm you.
 
iron_monkey said:
Awesome i'll have a word with his mum and dm you.
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Of course, early unpatched units are particularly worth saving and command a premium on resale, people go to great lengths to keep them running. :) - Personally id rather mod up an oled but then you need some skills to do that.
 
iron_monkey said:
Awesome i think his is probably 5 years old or more.
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If it comes my way at that age id probably swap out the battery from a random v2 shell as well if its never had a replacement - fwiw the v2 actually has the exact same battery and "improved battery" has actually nothing to do with the battery itself just lower power draw from its revised apu/board. It's basically a minor revision that has a lower power envelope.
 
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jrwagh333 said:
What's the point in this? Genuine question.
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I mean, why not?

It’s boxed with all its accessories, I’ve got a boxed Athlon 64 3500+ to go with it and a pair of 7900 GTO’s for SLI, to go inside a black Coolermaster ATCS 201. Pretty awesome retro build!

I love researching a specific year, reading all the reviews, hunting down the hardware. It’s a bit like a Time Machine for me. Those early to mid 2000’s were great times in my life and sometimes I think playing with the hardware from the time is as close as I get to going back for a short while. Plus it’s fun :)
 
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