Mental note to self...

When closing up a Gamecube, make sure the disc lid is up prior to setting it on the case.

I was cleaning up a Gamecube that I got for relatively cheap. Got all the insides cleaned and the case de-gunked. Putting it all back together I was hitting snags.

First the Open button wasn't working right.

Then the Reset button.

Then both.

Finally got both to function properly, but then the disc wouldn't spin. Turns out that I had the lid closed and jammed the top case back on. I ended up cracking the lid switch beyond repair.

...

I'm already tired from a shitty day at work. So all I did was short the connection for the lid switch and called it good.

Works perfect, but I have to figure out what do to for multi disc games like Metal Gear Solid...hard switch maybe? I dunno. I plan on hacking this one in the future, adding HDMI and SD card loading.

Gameboy Macro: Done!

...and I'm not happy with how the paint turned out.

First off, Valspar brand paint from Lowes sucks. Even if the color is pretty spot on for what I needed, it just didn't do as well as I wanted. Even after letting it dry for several days, it's still soft. It's so soft that there's finger prints left whenever I press down on it.

It's also my fault since I didn't notice that it was a paint and primer in one. I don't know if that means anything, but I guess it kinda messed things up. It went on a bit thicker than I wanted, so I had to scrape some paint off in order for the battery cover to go back on.

Even so, it's easily chipped/marred since it's still soft. So most of the paint work I did felt like all for naught.

...f**k...

HOWEVER...It does look pretty good (color wise) with the pink and green.

Chock it up for this being an experiment/practice in painting and my "skills" as a modder. I have a working Gameboy Macro with a really nice back light on it, so there's a plus.

If I do anything different, I'd use only Rustoleum for painting. I did put on a clear coat, but I guess I didn't put enough coats on it.

Pics to follow. It's late and I really just need to rest now.

Sprayed and sanded...

I did manage to take a pic of the case after more shaping and sanding on my iPad, but I couldn't get it to upload to Photobucket, so I just moved on.

Here's where we are at now.

I went with this color. In retrospect, I should've taken a pic with maybe the cartridge cover in the original pink to show the contrast, but honestly, it does look good. 

A little closer shot of the front panel. This is after one coat of paint and wet sanded. 

The back. That's water in the battery compartment, left over from rinsing after the wet sanding.

I'm letting it dry for another day before respraying and final sanding and polishing. Already got 1500 grit sandpaper for the final part. Gonna go get polish to finish it up.

Getting closer. I think a week and a half should be good.

More case work...

Got around to sanding the PlasticWeld off from the case. Used a coarse 120 grit and finished with a 320 grit.

Both sides. Still couldn't get the top front part of the case right. I may have sanded too hard and put a little slope on the back. When it's snapped together, though, you can barely tell it's there. I'm sure after paint it'll be ok.

...Yup, a little more pink showing there towards the top of the case. Maybe it's worse that I can see, but again, I'll have to see after painting it. The holes for X and Y came out nice, as well as the hole where the hinge was before. I modified the LED indicator lenses so it'll look at least stock DSish. 

Stylus hole patched and sanded nicely.

DS card slot patched up. I tried to sand it just right, but it seems that there's the slightest dip around the edge. 

Using a 1/16" drill bit, I made the speaker holes. The original mod has the speaker placed roughly where the stylus hole is. I opted to have it where the DS slot was. Testing shows that it sounds a lot better there. When I improve the case work, I may also add holes at the top of the slot that I covered to force the sound out that way. 

I need to pick up a 2 in 1 primer and some 1000 grit sandpaper. As for the color...still don't know what to go with. It may just end up being white...boring, boring white... 

Patching up the case...

As much as I didn't want to do it tonight, my brain said otherwise. I'll just say it quickly with pictures.

...There's gonna be a bunch of sanding to get this right...

Insides. I may have to redo some of the plastic filler after the first sanding. 

The area near Slot 2 is so flimsy that I cracked it by accident. I hope this little bit holds.

I'm gonna have to get some sand paper from the auto parts store so I can get a really nice finish on this. I may end up painting this thing white...probably sell it off if I can get another semi-working DS Lite in the near future.

Slowly getting back into modding...

I bought a busted up pink Nintendo DS Lite. The major flaw with this one was that the hinge was broken. Part of the screen was hanging off...I think it was the part that the ribbon cable goes through for the top screen.

I managed to test it prior to buying it and it powered up just fine. I bought it with a plan to mod it into a Gameboy Macro....this was several months ago. I just now got around to messing around with it.

I swapped the battery from this hashed one and replaced it in my wife's green DS Lite. There was a charging problem with it, but a quick battery swap solved that nicely. It came in handy on our flight.

The only part that I didn't have to really start the mod was the 330Ω resistor. I was at the point where I'd just use a regular resistor, but I had nothing in the 330Ω range. Closest I had was 220Ω, but I didn't want to risk it. So, I ended up ordering some SMD resistors as per the tutorial.

Tonight, I managed to get some work on it done. I managed to remove the DS card slot since I'm not gonna use that anymore, soldered the resistor in place, and soldered one speaker in (not really worried about having 2 there). I took the battery out of my wife's DS temporarily for testing.

First test failed. It was because I forgot to reinstall the WiFi module back to the board. I've read that it's required since the DS's BIOS is on it...or something like that. After reinserting the module, I powered it up and everything came on. Tested a game in it and it works perfect. I didn't have the buttons in, but I'm pretty sure that they're ok.

I ended up trimming the case down and get it ready for plastic fill before calling it a night with the project. I've been searching online for color compliments for the pink that I'm stuck with. I'm looking at certain types of paint and I recall vinyl spray paints are good since it doesn't just flake off like regular spray paints do. There's limited colors for vinyl spray paints, so I may end up painting this thing white.

Stay tuned...

Too lazy to take pics of projects...

I'll eventually put some up in this post, but maybe later.

Ended up cleaning the case of that Gameboy Pocket since it was super grungy. Other than the plastic screen needing to be replaced, it's working perfectly. I'll have to get a battery cover 3D printed sometime soon.

The case of the Master System 2 got scrubbed. There's some really narrow areas that I couldn't get scrubbed perfectly, so I just took my drying cloth to get into those crevices. I haven't tried it out since after cleaning, but I'm sure it's fine. The video mods will come in time.

I found a GB Color at Goodwill that I though I could use to case swap a non working one . Obviously, it didn't work, so I took a chance and scrubbed it like I did with the Pocket. I used a little bulb air duster (used mainly on cameras) to blow all the water out of the ICs and VIAs...I was really impatient.

There was some gunk on the little ribbon connector for the screen. I did some old skool cartridge connector cleaning to remove it. I removed majority of the gunk off; there was some gunk on there that I didn't want to try to scrape off without damaging the cable.

After a quick test assemble, the unit finally powered on and there was the familiar Gameboy "Ding" startup noise, but no display. I thought I ruined the cable and was already contemplating alternative connection methods, but all it really needed was to be reseated and locked properly. After doing that, it worked perfectly. I tested both the GBP and GBC with my Everdrive GB and everything worked perfectly!

Speaking of Everdrives, KRIKzz did release the Everdrive GBA. I managed to get into a group buy for one well under the standard price for one. I got to with it after getting back from vacation. It's a really nice kit. The group buy organizer included an SD card that had all the games presorted, so it was ready to go out of the envelope! Very awesome.

Now, speaking about vacation. I managed to bring home our family's old Laserdisc player. It was just collecting dust, so I managed to take it with me on the way back from Hawaii. It did survive the trip with no damages or problems.

Why the Laserdisc? I'm keeping it for sentimental value. Long story short, my dad and I both brainstormed on what to get my mom for a gift. It was mainly used for karaoke, but it since just collected dust for years.

Found some Laserdiscs at Goodwill, including The Empire Strikes Back (untoched FTW!). Tested those out with the player and it works perfect!

I think I'll just add pics in a later posts. It's late, insomnia sucks, and I need to sleep...and shower...

Back from vaca and some stuff...

Before I went on vacation, I found a decent looking Gameboy Pocket at a Goodwill Outlet. It was a bit grungy, but I figured it might be worth a shot to see if it worked OK.

...it didn't. Didn't power on at all.

I opened it up to see if there was some corrosion that could easily be cleaned off, but it wasn't that easy. There was a spill inside, and it got all over the components on the mainboard. I tried a quick degunking with alcohol and swabs, but it didn't work.

...had to go a little deeper than that.

I ended up taking it to the sink and scrubbing it with an old toothbrush and dish soap until all the gunk came off. I pretty much let it dry for almost 3 weeks. Coming back from vaca, I had a little time tonight to do a quick reassemble and test.

...lo and behold, it powered on! All I need to do now is clean up the case itself and it's good to go (I hope).

During vaca, a sale thread came up on a Facebook group I'm in. A friend of mine tagged me in a post. It had a Sega Master System 2 in it for a good price! I immediately PM'd the seller to see if he could hold it for me until I got back from vaca, but my friend insisted that he'd get it for me, possibly for me helping him move and whatnot a couple of months back.

...for the record, I'd help a friend out for free...or at least for food. So this was an awesome gesture.

Other than the controller it came with, the console worked perfectly! I just got it disassembled to get it cleaned up and possibly modded for A/V/S-Video mods later.

There are more things to include, but it's late and I was excited to blog again, even for little things like this.

I'll put pics up later...maybe I might go over what I did on vacation soon as well.

After 18 years....

Too lazy to blog nowadays. Anyway...

Latest thing? Pokemon GO! Yes, gave me reason to like Pokemon again...Speaking of which...

After 18 years, I finally finished my Pokemon Red version...the original Gameboy game.

I first got it when I was 22. Played the hell out of it. Grinded the hell out of it. Made a huge effort to get all the Pokemon in the game. Before I stopped playing, I was in the process of getting the last legendary Pokemon, Moltres.

I remember saving right before the battle with it. The first time I encountered Moltres, I accidentally killed it. From there, it was a combination of either killing it (fainting, whatever) or running out of Ultra Balls (wasted my Master Ball on Zapdos). This went on at least 18 times or so a day. I got fed up, I just stopped playing it.

Fast forward 10 or so years later. I picked up a Super Gameboy from a Goodwill and wanted to test it. I found my Pokemon Red and popped that in. Remembered about that bastard Moltres and how frustrating it was trying to catch it. Just for giggles, I took some time trying to catch it again. It took me no more than 5 retries or so to finally catch it!

...but then I didn't remember where I was or what do to...back to the bin it goes.

Fast forward to the release of Pokemon GO! After catching some Pokemon and taking pics with them with my kids, I felt the need to finally finish Red. I figured I'd just get into random battles and let all my Pokemon faint. Doing that took longer than I expected since I had some high level Pokemon in my team.

...since it's been 18 years since I've seriously played Pokemon, I had to use an online guide...that helped a lot. Needless to say, the guide helped me get my team going for the final boss(es) battle(s), and those battles were pretty one-sided at times.

Anyway, happy that I was able to finally finish it after all this time.

My team consisted of: Articuno, Zapdos, Moltres, Venusaur (my evolved starter), Slowbro, and Pikachu.

Oh, and mods...Tendinitis still there, so nothing currently...soon, though...

GASP! He's alive! And still blogging!

Well, sort of. Been real lazy to blog at all.

What's going on? Not a whole lot.

First off, I have maybe about 3 repairs to finish up. One is a 2DS that needs a fuse replaced. Another is a JVC X'Eye that has no CD player functionality. The last one? The PCE Duo-R...again...

What happened to it? Well, after PRGE, something happened to it and now it won't boot up. Sources (AKA forums I frequent) say that the region mod might be the culprit, second to that is the little repair that was done on the console before (follow the PCE's mods from last year). I haven't had time to look at it, but I will soon. I want to get that finished up quickly.

In terms of finds, I found just little things here and there. Biggest one so far was a 2001 series PSP, the ones that you can connect to a TV. I just recently updated that to the newest available custom firmware.

I tried updating my old one as well to a new one call Infinity...that was a huge mistake.

Let's put it this way: I didn't read as closely as I should have and after updating, I bricked my 1000 series PSP.

...trust me, not my proudest moment...

I did have a recovery battery system to unbrick it (Pandora Battery and a Magic Memory Stick), but I didn't know where I placed it. I had to continue the search the next day.

I eventually found the recovery battery and went to work updating it to it's former glory. An update here and there and properly flashing the correct custom firmware, I have it back to it's former glory.

What a time to be alive.

I've had several personal mod projects that need to be done as well: The Genesis and the Atari 5200. The 5200 has a bit of casework to do before I move on, so I may tackle that first...as soon as I finish the rest of the repairs....ugh...

New Year...

Yay first post of 2016!

No mod projects on hand just yet. I just have a SNES to work on and the Panasonic Q to finish up after the part comes in. Then comes the repair of the PC Engine again...I really hope that it's something simple and nothing super complex.

Otherwise, I got a PS4 for Christmas from my mom and my wife. Playing Star Wars Battlefront...and having a lot of fun with it! I got Minecraft as well for my daughter so when my brother in-law gets his Playstation Plus account running, her cousins can join her online to build stuff together.

Hoping that I can do more posts, game related or not, this year. We'll see what happens.