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

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I'll give the IPA trick a go, if not I've just checked the iFixit guide and that looks easy enough to replace and 25 squid from China. Win.

Cheers chap!

If you need one I can sort you cheaper and faster than £25 from china :) Plus it will be a genuine slot rather than a repro.

Have 2 spare lite slots and a spare OG slot.
 
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Oh sweet, thanks. It's an OG Switch, the Oh-est of Gs!

Then you need one of these type, the one at the bottom..



They have a more complex pcb with an IC on it that the lite doesn't have. This one was the one that was in my dead cpu donor switch. I paid like £60 for that switch and its screen is now in one of the unpatched switches. It's IC's are distributed between a few switch lites here in the UK and its mainboard is now in Texas in the US as somebody needed all of the caps around one of the bigger Max IC's.
 
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Well the IPA and cart soak method seems to have worked a treat. Just tried all their games multiple times, and no failures yet. If it gets me a night's peace it was worth the effort. :D Thank you!

Although, I was kinda looking forward to popping the Switch opening and fixing it...
 
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Well the IPA and cart soak method seems to have worked a treat. Just tried all their games multiple times, and no failures yet. If it gets me a night's peace it was worth the effort. :D Thank you!

Although, I was kinda looking forward to popping the Switch opening and fixing it...

FYI that also works with the joycon drift issues. Spray contact cleaner/IPA under the dust cap and spin the stick 5 or so times then leave to dry.
 
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Some nice work in this thread!

I've got a GBA that I really want to do the IPS screen mod to but haven't a clue what I need/where to start!

Then keep watching as I have an ips kit coming for one. When it's here I'll share a link and show what it takes to fit it. I think they are a simple enough install.
 
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Then keep watching as I have an ips kit coming for one. When it's here I'll share a link and show what it takes to fit it. I think they are a simple enough install.
Nice I'll definitely check back then.

From what I cather it requires a slight mod to the housing but otherwise isn't too bad? Bit of soldering etc
 
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Well my niece liked the yellow switch so the yellow switch and 4 of my games have now officially been stolen :cry: Ori, Mario party, Crash Team Racing and Minecraft are no longer, probably fine as I haven't played any of them anyway but im out of pocket on that one as well now! I just can't say no to the niece and nephew. Ill let the niece test drive it for a bit and she will no doubt tell me if it plays up. I had it for all of a day after repairing it :cry: Got another couple coming so all is well and lets be honest the half interesting one is the custom one anyway :)
 
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Well my niece liked the yellow switch so the yellow switch and 4 of my games have now officially been stolen :cry:

At least you'll be getting some cool uncle points for that one. Good gift!

I was looking at cost of IPS modded GBAs in UK and they seem to fetch some decent prices? Here they aren't nearly as sought after.
 
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At least you'll be getting some cool uncle points for that one. Good gift!

I was looking at cost of IPS modded GBAs in UK and they seem to fetch some decent prices? Here they aren't nearly as sought after.

An IPS modded one goes for roughly £100 here so there is certainly some profit to be made in them :)
 
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My original Game Gear handed over to Vince! Pleasure to meet you, hope there's no nasty surprises inside it. Although did see a bug in the battery compartment.
 
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My original Game Gear handed over to Vince! Pleasure to meet you, hope there's no nasty surprises inside it. Although did see a bug in the battery compartment.

:cry: let's see what she looks like when we get inside! Great to meet you as well, always good to put another face to a name. I may even make a start on it tonight! Either way I will record the repair/mod so everyone can see what's involved. Updates in here as always. :D
 
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My original Game Gear handed over to Vince! Pleasure to meet you, hope there's no nasty surprises inside it. Although did see a bug in the battery compartment.

Made a start and already have 10gb or more of footage... I wish it was a simple recap but there is a mainboard sound issue I need to trace. There was a mainboard issue with video but I think I have that one smashed now. At least I can make out one game on the OG LCD... Just about to go in for round 3 on it :D
 
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Well we can add another 3 hours of footage, sadly a lot of this footage is going to be a bit difficult to share unless i do quite a lot of work on it (its now 20 odd gb of footage) as I was streaming it to a repair community and it got a bit sweary/busy in a few places and I spend a lot of time talking to the people watching and not a lot of time explaining what I am doing, @NutritioN your gg is now known as the GG that will only ever run marble madness... Anyway, this one is being a nightmare! I managed to get it displaying some stuff on the old LCD after a recap (only 1 game would work at all and its display was slightly corrupt) but after a while (several hours of troubleshooting) I managed to get something that looked like it should work display wise so went ahead with the IPS install... now I can't get it to display.

I've taken off the VRAM and tested every trace, I've taken off the SDRAM and have tested every trace. All the traces below those chips and going from those chips are fine. So I put the two chips back on. I've now got the two sega IC's off the board and am testing all the traces to and from those IC's. Once I have tested all of these and am happy ill put the sega chips back on. I did notice that the card slot compared to mine has a loser connection so have done some work on that but im still not 100% convinced by it.









We know something is not right, I have just got to find out what. 90% of the traces out of the cart slot head over to the vram IC so that's the main culprit right now, the remaining traces head over to the sega IC closest to the cart slot which is the audio chip. Tomorrow ill put it onto my GG to see if it works, next im not 100% on the cart slot and don't trust it but ive tested the life out of it and it 'Seems" fine but im still not 100% confident in it. There are basically 8 main parts to the puzzle, there are 6 IC's, the cart slot and then the traces on the board. This GG also has this odd thing that I havent had on any other board yet and it smells rancid when working on it almost like fish. I did some googling and it's apparently from caps that have emptied their electrolyte fluids so before i work on it tomorrow im going to give the board a bath in deionised water just in case that helps us out.

Little break down of what we know:

Things we know 100% work

- recapped power board - Tested in my GG
- recapped sound board - Tested in my GG
- LCD screen.- Tested in my GG
- contrast wheel is working and changing screen brightness so im pretty sure the screen daughter board is working.

Mainboard working:
- vcc rail is perfect, a perfect 5.1v. The GG powers up perfectly and has no power issues. Our issues are somewhere in it's data lines. That's either it's not making good contact with carts as the most basic down to a faulty IC or two as a worst case.

Mainboard not working:
- Audio - Something is very wrong with audio and I have not yet managed to get any recognisable audio out of the GG. This is tied somewhat to a working video so atm im putting this to the side.

- Video - You can see above I have had some sort of video, just not reliable video of any sort (bar around 10 mins where I had perfect ish video for that 10 mins on only 1 of my 8 or so games though.)

I'm going to go all out though and will make this GG work, even if I have to transplant every IC one at a time onto my GG to work out which one is faulty or even swap out it's cart slot, whatever it is I will find it, there are only so many components on the board and im willing to transplant them onto my GG one at a time to test them if that is what it ends up taking.
 
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I bit the bullet last night and bought an oscilloscope so I can probe all the data lines on the board. I got thinking, we know it power or "red light" sequence is good as it stays on. So after that its all about clock signals that I cant measure because I dont have the kit... So now we at least have the kit on the way
 
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