Dmg Frankenboard!!
Just posting this monstrosity because I’m proud to say I’ve (nearly) brought it back from death by battery acid. I’ve spent more time messing around with this dam thing than I’d like to admit… I’m very new to soldering and diagnosing stuff like this so I bit off more then I could chew with this at first. I wish so bad I had thought to take a before picture… But to give you an idea, my first step was to drop the whole thing in a bowl of vinegar. I had so much trouble diagnosing everything I recapped it for no reason, took the power switch apart for no reason, and went through two set of batteries on the multimeter I used… the DC converter board and sound board are not original too. The originals were fubar… But anyway, it still has an issue every once in a while where it goes blank after initial boot. I literally just put pressure on one of the spots where I jumped some vias and it works again. I’ve tried poking the solder while it’s running a game until I found the crappy solder jobs I did and re-flowing them. Now I can poke all of them and it doesn’t crash. But still every couple boots it goes blank. Is there something else I should try that I’m missing? I really want this piece of crap to work consistently now that I’m so close lol
But if I can’t I’m still happy I got some good experience and practice from this. I’ve been able to repair much better off boards with ease now 😂
Also worth mentioning that right out of the eBay package I ran a game on it for a few minutes with the DC jack before it quit. Couldn’t believe it worked at all after I saw the inside but if it never booted I wouldn’t have even tried.