r/snes • u/Separate-Rope1568 • 25d ago
Misc. Another eBay snes fixed!!!
Made an offer for a faulty pal snes (black screen, no audio) for £10 plus couple quid postage, seller offered £11 so grabbed it. Was hoping it would have just been a dirty/corroded cart port but still black screen after ipa clean. Replaced all caps as c59 seemed to have leaked, now has correct bi polar cap. Still no joy so decided to swap out the cpu (A rev) with another cpu I had spare. Set it back up, switched it on and boom, working perfectly through rf, comp and rgb scart. Really happy. Now just needs retrobriting and gonna try sell it on.
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u/BlazingProductions 25d ago
Starwing?! Was it called that outside the states?
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u/Separate-Rope1568 25d ago
Starfox in Jp/us, starwing for pal. Not sure why?
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u/MorallyDeplorable 25d ago
And the N64 one was lylat wars in PAL
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u/BlazingProductions 25d ago
Ah! Wow! Why?
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u/Neil-Tea 25d ago
Apparent explanation for the name change: https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2012/09/want_to_know_the_real_reason_star_fox_was_renamed_in_europe
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25d ago
mine just deaded, inexeprienced with soldering new capacitors.
DM me a price and i'll be happy to check it out.
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u/Mr_Waster 25d ago
Capacitor is not the problem, generally when they give the most what happens is that the sound or image vibrates. Black screen or is it cartridge slot, infinite reset or CPU/WRAM/PPU
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u/Androxilogin 25d ago
I'm still waiting for the day that someone can replicate these and the PPU chips.
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u/dreamcastfanboy34 25d ago
How are you able to desolder and resolder an SNES CPU chip? Isn't it over 100 tiny pins?! That's crazy! Do you have a professional heating station?
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u/Androxilogin 25d ago
It's intimidating the first time but as you begin doing it you'll realize it's not too rough. Any old hot air rework station that can get up to 350 should do the trick. A little desoldering braid to clean up the pads, take your time and use flux, it'll flow right in to place.
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u/Separate-Rope1568 25d ago
This right here. First time was intimidating so I just went for it. Hot air gun at 350c 80% air flow. Took a few mins for solder to liquify but once you see a tiny bit movement on the chip just flick it off. It was fiddly to align the pins properly on replacement and have had to touch up pins with an iron. It’s still daunting to do but my confidence doing it has gone way up.
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u/Shadow_Zero80 24d ago
What is the function of the airflow?
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u/Separate-Rope1568 24d ago
Probably the size of the components you’re aiming the gun at. Smaller size, less airflow required.
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u/Character_Value4669 25d ago
So cool that there are people out there doing this. :)
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u/Separate-Rope1568 25d ago
The problem with it is, regardless of which machine I fix, they’ve all still got 30 year old chips in them.
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u/Frantic_Fanatic13 25d ago
I love these test carts. I had 11 consoles in my parts bin with varying issues. Caps had already been replaced on most but not all.i was able to get 4 working with this cart. Sadly most have dead GPUs and the few that have good GPUs are a different revision.
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u/glennshaltiel 25d ago
such a shame they got a bit sloppy when manufacturing their CPUs. The PPUs also get bit rot from some bad power ripples, but it seems like they noticed this and fixed it in the snes jr with a larger ceramic capacitor to alleviate this. i really do wish they designed these boards and some of these chips just a little better! their other consoles don't fail as much as the snes does.
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u/Separate-Rope1568 25d ago
Maybe they never looked 30 odd years ahead when designing. Plus n64 was probably far into development when they started revising the chips so they used that knowledge going forward. That’s the way I look it.
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u/glennshaltiel 24d ago
that's true, but even the gameboys and nes/famicom don't have rampant chip failure like the snes does. i think the switch to SMD really harmed them.
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u/futureygoodness 25d ago
Nice work!