Genesis Cart Fix and NES Update again...

Actually, I fixed this Genesis cart a while ago. 

My friend had a Michael Jackson's Moonwalker that was just booting to a black screen. He gave it to me a while ago... like, 3 or so years ago. It's just been sitting there, staring me in the face, asking to be fixed.

I was bored, so I took a whack at it.

I did a quick online search that lead me to this Reddit post with the same issue. That post lead to this YouTube video. In the video, it's mentioned that a bad connection to the game ROM chip can go bad, and adding a 1KΩ resistor between the bad point on the ROM chip and ground. 

Unfortunately, I didn't have a 1KΩ resistor on hand. An order on Amazon and about 24 hours later, I got a good assortment of resistors delivered. 

A quick snip and soldering of the resistor and the job was done. The only console I had nearby that I could test the game with was a Mega Drive. Happy to say that the game worked perfectly and I was able to get a few levels finished before I called it good.

So, yay! That's finally done. 

So, to update on the NES, I mentioned in the last post that I desoldered the PPU from the Lava RGB board and soldered in a DIP socket to the board so I could socket the PPU on the board. Well, it added a little more thickness to the board that It wouldn't sit flat. I didn't want to desolder anything off the board anymore, so I ended up trimming up the case.

I really didn't need to cut out a big chunk of it, but it was just easier to follow the lines of the case mold. It doesn't look really bad, to be honest.

With the cover on it, it's hardly noticeable. 

I'm having issues with the original video RCA jack not working. The original Lava RGB wiki is kinda vague about the video installation, but it looks like the composite video connection is shared from the Lava RGB board to both the video pin on the 10 pin Sega Saturn connector (it comes with the kit, I opted not to use it and used the Nintendo Multi-out connector instead), and also the video pin on the original Power/RF/AV board. That's something I may try later. Stay tuned for that!