Stuff, stuff, and more stuff...

Well. I really don't have much to blog about most days.

I've repaired my friend's JVC X'Eye. It's been a year and a half, but all it really needed was a new laser for the disc drive. Luckily, he had some spare ones that worked perfectly.

Did a swap meet a few weeks ago. I was able to sell off a box of doubles/crap games that I just needed to get rid of. Managed to get a game to add to my "Pulse Label" Famicom games, closing the collection to 2 more to find.

I also *kinda* managed to get a PS4 fight stick, still need to break it in.

Goodwill finds? I managed to find a Blu-ray/VHS player. Pretty much holy grail. Also found a Dell touchscreen computer for cheap! All I needed was a hard drive to test it out. Several operating system tests later, got it working, running Win 10.

 I guess I failed to mention my Christmas gift as well. I got a really nice desoldering gun. Tested it on a few boards I had laying around. Works perfect. Bring on some recapping projects!

That's it for now. I know I lack pics, but I'll hopefully start bringing more in.

I should really stop watching repair videos...

It seems that there are a lot of console repair videos that have been popping up in my YouTube feed, from pros to amateurs doing mods and repairs. The amateurs go online and pick up broken consoles on the cheap and repair them.

...the temptation is real.

I think after I fixed the Jaguar and a few NES consoles, I've been back in repair/mod mode. There are quite a few consoles that popped up on eBay that I wouldn't mind getting, but with Christmas coming up, I'll have to put those on hold.

My Turbo Everdrive is officially dead. I might have to send it out to get repaired, but only time will tell.

Slowly getting back into the habit...but...

Man, my soldering job is atrocious!

I haven't soldered an SOIC (Small Outline Integrated Circuit), and some of the videos I've seen online make it seem easy to do.

...it wasn't...

Well, I tried to be clever and do a drag solder it into position, but it got really gloppy. My solder wick is really loose, so it kept leaving strands here and there, but after some coaxing, I got it out. 

...BTW, I was working on an Atari Jaguar with power problems...also, don't use an adapter from an NES to power ANYTHING! Get rid of it and use a model 1 Genesis adapter. 

Anyway, I was able to get both SOICs installed and replace a blown capacitor...about that...I had the hardest time removing said cap, even as a through-hole component. My solder sucker, as well as it kinda served me in the past, is now not really the best thing for removing said components. I was able to free up one hole, but the one connected to the larger ground plane was being a nuisance. I just ended up bending the leg on the capacitor and connected it directly to the blob there while getting the other side installed properly.

...I failed to mention that I got the 2 SOICs off using a hot air rework station I'm borrowing from a friend...I need to get me one of those...comes in real handy.

Since I had the solder station out, I figured I'd try fixing an Xbox One controller that had a bad analog stick. I've been meaning to do this for months, but I was too lazy to dig out my soldering station.

Using my old solder sucker, I was able to pretty much remove all the solder where I needed to from the stick. It took some time, especially with the ground points, but I managed to coax it out from the board and replace it with no problems. Needless to say, the controller is as good as new.


I mentioned that I got a PC Engine Duo R from PRGE last month, that had issues with RGB as it wasn't displaying colors properly (Doujindance modded). Well, I got it to work, fairly easily too.

...Quick note, I bought an OSSC that'll take an RGB signal to HDMI through DVI-D...tested it with what I had, and it works awesomely!

Anyway, what had happened was that when I was cleaning out my tool box, I came upon the SCART cable that I got with an RGB board for the PC Engine several years back. So I figured, I'll try that out on the OSSC.

...It worked! The colors were perfect! I lucked out on a good deal all because of a bad cable!

But in the same process, I killed my version 1 Turbo Everdrive.

A sad day indeed....but I have a version 2...that doesn't work with a Doujindance modded console.

I'm planning on taking out the mod currently in the PC Engine and update both the region and RGB mods in it, but I need to remove all the epoxy used on all the parts of the mod...oh boy...

PRGE 2018...

It took me about a week to recover from it...just barely recover.

Mainly pluses here from the event:

It didn't take long for us to get Xboxes ready for the battle arena this time around. They pretty much were working well from the time we put them away last year.

So many sales were done on day one, even with us being a little late for setup.

I got to finish up my collections (Black Label NES and Super Famicom Street Fighter games).

Added a PC Engine Duo-R to my collection, along with an AV Famicom and a Playstation Vita. The PCE is kinda janky in RGB, but I'm gonna work on it when I have time in the future, since it's been modded by a kinda questionable modder on eBay.

All in all, it was fun. But now, to try to recover from it... It's just so exhausting doing that 3 day event.

I've already "hacked" the PS Vita, but only have gone as far as that. I have to figure out how to transfer games to it, among other things.

Got too excited and forgot to report back...

One thing I didn't think about when I bid on the RAM was if it was AMD only RAM.

Thankfully, it wasn't.

...this rig is flying pretty decently!

I've been playing some games that I normally wouldn't be able to play on it...and I'm loving it! The fact that Street Fighter V and Dragon Ball FighterZ works at max settings is just awesome!

...gonna go back to playing! Maybe I'll be back if I have time to do mods.

Slowly getting a *decent* gaming rig...

Well, I upgraded the video card with a nVidia GTX 1050 Ti.

...WAY BETTER PERFORMANCE!

I'm actually surprised that I could find a high(er) end video card that would fit in this old work computer.

I just won some RAM to upgrade to 8GB. I didn't take into account that this computer might not be able to use the RAM I got, but only one way to find out.

So far, games that used to stutter when I played with the GT 710 now doesn't. All the higher quality videos on YouTube play a lot better.

Tired. I'll report back after I get the RAM installed and hopefully working.

Ok, so I'm just lazy...

Since the move, I've been really exhausted. Long drive to and from work, sometimes deplorable people that I have to help...it's exhausting.

...and we're still not moved in...technically, we are moved in the house, but as having a comfortable work room and play room, it's s-l-o-w-l-y coming along.

That thing at the beginning of the year with my computer...I revisited the other day. Since it's been a while trying to figure out what was wrong with it, I had to play around with it. It kept giving me a thermal event warning for the shutdown, so I did the obvious and reapplied thermal grease to the CPU.

...still giving me the error.

I thought it could've been the power supply, so I bought a new one and installed that. Still getting a thermal event shutdown.

More Googling lead me to check if there were leaking capacitors...low and behold, there were some burst ones.

The computer that I merged all the old stuff in was still working great, so I was gonna swap the quad core in the now dead computer into the new one, but a friend of mine gave me a CPU that *kinda* one-ups the quad core.

It was a 3.0 GHz Core2 Extreme...seems to work perfect for what this old Dell. I'm already seeing much speed improvement from the original Dual Core that was in it. Just gotta get some RAM and a new video card to get at least a semi-decent game rig going.

That Duo-R that I've been reluctant to work on? I outsourced the repair job and got it fixed...finally. I haven't tested it just yet, but I'm confident that it works...otherwise, I should have a warranty on it.

Vacation took us to Disney World. We all had fun. The best was that I finally got to see Epcot up close! I've only seen Spaceship Earth  in books and magazines. I was enamored by the architecture, so imagine my excitement to see it up close!

I did get around to finding some slim PS3's. Got a couple of them cleaned up. One I sold to a friend, one I kept and hacked. I'm also finding a bunch of Dual Shock 3's while out hunting. There were a few Dual Shock 4's that I found, that I got cleaned and repaired.

I had that 3D printer built up and made some stuff. It's a headache, but still fun.

...lazy to post pictures...I keep saying that I'm gonna post pics and keep blogging, but...well, check what I mentioned at the beginning of this blog.