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

Just been chilling tonight, finished working on consoles for the night after the lynx but decided to just clean up some of my auction stuff. Genuinely can't believe how good condition the vcs is in for something so old.





Got a repro stick and a good looking genuine on the way. Am hoping I can use some of the repro to fix my slightly dodgey genuine but otherwise a repro for the second stick will do. Still just going through giving it a good clean and a bit of love.
 
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Tonight I spent some time helping out a dude fix his neo geo pocket by taking random measurements and videos of my modded pocket. That same dude has been helping me in return with some swan stuff. This is going somewhere I promise because after we finished the Neo geo I picked his brain around a few swan things and things around working with altera mx fpga's. Getting in the mood for some mods I decided to quickly ips mod and fix my swan colour...









The observant will notice that the game is clearly in English and that's because this cart is hardware modded to enable a translation...



Problem is very few of the games are on this pcb so you can only do this to a few, plus not all games even have a translation. But there does exist a database of roms translated by fans of the console. So...
Behind the scenes I've been slowly gathering items, dev boards, programmers, chips etc and tonight I decided that as there is not much in my queue (a few gpu's, a car key, and a psu left) that I would start having a look at starting to make some of my own carts and also start looking at repairing a couple of bricked gameboy flash carts I have.

Here is where I left, I have a altera mx dev board connected via jtag to an altera USB blaster which is connected to my pc. On the pc I have Altera Quartus II which is basically a platform for designing and programming fpga's. Here are some of the toys...




Now these chips are used in a lot of carts, here is a bricked gameboy flash cart and the Fpga:



But crucially, for the swan stuff there just happens to be an open source gerber file for the board and guess what, it uses the same altera fpga:

github.com

GitHub - X-death25/WonderSwan-Classic: Open Source PCB clone of WonderSwan PTE-0012A

Open Source PCB clone of WonderSwan PTE-0012A. Contribute to X-death25/WonderSwan-Classic development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com

So ive got some pcb's on order. Time to make some English swan carts :D You will also notice I already have the sop44 rom chips to go on this pcb, I also have a TL48 pro:



(for the nand chip on the GB flash carts) and a TL56 - XGecu programmers for sop44 programming of the MX chips on the swan cart. With a bit of luck and some learning after doing a few bits here I might actually be able to make some cool things with my new found knowledge and array of what has ended up being a lot of relatively expensive toys which all started with wanting to fix a £40 cart :D
 
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Was at a boot sale today and saw a Master System 1. As I was looking on the bay for going resale prices, someone came in asked for price and bought it for £10. Funny thing is, he asked how much is this Atari!

Obviously no idea if it works but I think it was a little silly of me not grabbing it straight away.

Are they sought for consoles Vince?
 
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kakarott said:
Was at a boot sale today and saw a Master System 1. As I was looking on the bay for going resale prices, someone came in asked for price and bought it for £10. Funny thing is, he asked how much is this Atari!

Obviously no idea if it works but I think it was a little silly of me not grabbing it straight away.

Are they sought for consoles Vince?
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The SMS 1 is a bit more sought after than the sms2 for sure. For £10 it was a bargain... it probably worked as well! Almost every master system I have ever come across has worked.
 
LuckyBenski said:
Blimey Vince, getting into custom boards, FPGA, ROM assembly... you'll run out of road soon and have to invent something new to master!
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This is what happens, first you aim to just fix a thing and then you realise that to fix said thing you will need to be able to dig a bit deeper. Before you know it you are down a massive rabbit hole :D
 
Gents I got another new toy! I figured if im going to mess around with carts that I may as well make life easy... Gentlemen I present to you the baby heat plate!





You have to excuse the state of my mouse mat, its only a few weeks old and its ruined, I got through about one every few months just cant keep them clean or free from burns etc... This is a working space where **** gets done, not a showroom :D
 
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Well success!! I've unbricked and updated all of the bricked flash carts!! All had "Authentication Error" and are Flash Cart Pro - I'd call that a success!!

I was convinced at first it was something in the fpga... it's not, swapped them and the bricked was still bricked so I moved on to the nand.



Nifty little hot plate in action:



So i wipped the nand off of the 2023 version and connected it up to the pc and pulled a copy!



This is me re-programming the nand on the flash carts with an image I took off of the 2023 version that you seemingly cannot brick in the same way!!




and back together :D




This bad boy does such a good job!



End result the bricked carts are now better than they were as you just can't brick them now.
 
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I keep getting Wonderswans recommended to me on the used app here. They are basically worthless, so I've always been tempted to just to try it out.
The main problem for me is the cost of the flashcarts. There doesn't seem to be many for sale (in this area).
I have a lot of roms but none are translated. I guess I should have a look for some of these.

This weekend I put a Game boy pocket in to a new shell, with an IPS screen. It's good but it didn't come with any extra wire to control the screen with the start/select buttons. I need to shift it a couple of pixels to the right for the alignment. Will order some small wire, and work out how to do this.
I started For the Frog the Bell Tolls on it, and it's just nice playing on the correct hardware.
 
Emlyn_Dewar said:
I keep getting Wonderswans recommended to me on the used app here. They are basically worthless, so I've always been tempted to just to try it out.
The main problem for me is the cost of the flashcarts. There doesn't seem to be many for sale (in this area).
I have a lot of roms but none are translated. I guess I should have a look for some of these.

This weekend I put a Game boy pocket in to a new shell, with an IPS screen. It's good but it didn't come with any extra wire to control the screen with the start/select buttons. I need to shift it a couple of pixels to the right for the alignment. Will order some small wire, and work out how to do this.
I started For the Frog the Bell Tolls on it, and it's just nice playing on the correct hardware.
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Worthless... How dare you :cry: - I have 50 PCB's coming for those sweet english games!! If you grab a swan I will hook you up with some english games :) Oh and as far as I am aware a flash cart for the swan does not exist.... yet :)
 
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Emlyn_Dewar said:
I keep getting Wonderswans recommended to me on the used app here. They are basically worthless, so I've always been tempted to just to try it out.
The main problem for me is the cost of the flashcarts. There doesn't seem to be many for sale (in this area).
I have a lot of roms but none are translated. I guess I should have a look for some of these.

This weekend I put a Game boy pocket in to a new shell, with an IPS screen. It's good but it didn't come with any extra wire to control the screen with the start/select buttons. I need to shift it a couple of pixels to the right for the alignment. Will order some small wire, and work out how to do this.
I started For the Frog the Bell Tolls on it, and it's just nice playing on the correct hardware.
Click to expand...

From experience the pocket ips doesnt actually work with an OSD. you basically get alignment right and you only get a single shot at it. Oh and I may have bought way more PCB's than I think I will ever need :p - Going to make a custom resin printed cart cover for my UK mods. May even sell some rom swapped games and stuff - Will need to read the license on the pcb to see if thats something I could potentially do. But yea $100 on PCB's :D



The black ones are super expensive as I went all out on the gold!!

There are some incredibly expensive swan games out there for example Judgement Sword - Thats like a £1k cart.
 
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Vince said:
Worthless... How dare you :cry: - I have 50 PCB's coming for those sweet english games!! If you grab a swan I will hook you up with some english games :) Oh and as far as I am aware a flash cart for the swan does not exist.... yet :)
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I had a look after posting, it looks like a bit of a hassle programming the boards. I did see a good few of them on Taobao though.
To clarify, I think they are cool but the price is pretty damn low on the Wonderswan here. Non-colour OG models look like could get for about 20 quid equivalent.
Have always wanted to have a play with one, but it might be a system just to be played on the Retroid Pocket. :D

I'm a bit sad about that GBP screen insight. I did see there were quite a few more solder points available on the ribbon cable, but didn't look at what they were. It's fine to play, but it's in my head that I want it better. :D
 
Emlyn_Dewar said:
I had a look after posting, it looks like a bit of a hassle programming the boards. I did see a good few of them on Taobao though.
To clarify, I think they are cool but the price is pretty damn low on the Wonderswan here. Non-colour OG models look like could get for about 20 quid equivalent.
Have always wanted to have a play with one, but it might be a system just to be played on the Retroid Pocket. :D

I'm a bit sad about that GBP screen insight. I did see there were quite a few more solder points available on the ribbon cable, but didn't look at what they were. It's fine to play, but it's in my head that I want it better. :D
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id 100% give it a a go to see. wiring up the buttons to the pads shouldn't be hard. The trick with getting these perfect is removing the little post flanges on the left and aligning top and left, right up against the post. They have that incredibly thin lcd panel so once you are down on the adhesive there is absolutely no room for moving it, not without breaking the panel at least. I think the "flash cart" for the swan you are talking about is the flash meister. sad thing is its kinda a single game cart which sort of defeats the object of a flash cart. I do however know people are working on proper flash carts but it will be a while!
 
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pingwing said:
Feel like the next logical step Vince is your going to design a flash cart borrowing from those gameboy ones…
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I'm having a look... I started working out some details on how I might go about programming an fpga and how that might look. I started my career many years ago as a dev so have some basic knowledge but not specific knowledge. I am also working with somebody that's built their own test carts and done some programming for these platforms so potentially we may be able to make something. I do hope I can make something cool but its still very early days for me and I'm still understanding how the electronics and the programming work together to allow this.

Building my own test cart for example with a simple gameboy cart could be fairly easy as you develop your rom, stick it on a cart and away you go. The complexities added by building sat a flash cart, at least with my current level of understanding is a very different prospect. I am however always up for a challenge so who knows
 
Fixed up a few pads... tested them all on the ps3 and they are all working sweet - of 7 pads ive now got 5 really solid ones... But here is the kicker... 2 of these pads report as fake... Can you tell which ones are which?



I cant tell any difference in the way they work/function or in fact the way they look - Can you?
 
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randal said:
Top one and bottom left.

If I'm right, I'll tell you how I worked it out.

If I'm wrong then you get bupkis. :D
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Nope its the two on the right!!! honestly I weighed them... visually I cannot tell the difference. The only reason i know is because I have some software that tells me... its total madness. They are visually identical so far as I can tell.
 
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Vince said:
Nope its the two on the right!!! honestly I weighed them... visually I cannot tell the difference. The only reason i know is because I have some software that tells me... its total madness. They are visually identical so far as I can tell.
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What about the PCBs? Any indication there?

If identical I wonder if you could clone the legit ones controller/firmware onto the clone?
 
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