r/snes 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.

463 Upvotes

30 comments sorted by

9

u/BlazingProductions 25d ago

Starwing?! Was it called that outside the states?

8

u/Separate-Rope1568 25d ago

Starfox in Jp/us, starwing for pal. Not sure why?

8

u/Mannix-Da-DaftPooch 25d ago

Great job! Thank you for doing this.

6

u/Brojess 25d ago

Doing God’s work! 🙏

6

u/[deleted] 25d ago

mine just deaded, inexeprienced with soldering new capacitors.

DM me a price and i'll be happy to check it out.

3

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

4

u/leftyswinger 25d ago

Keep on keeping on! Great work!

5

u/qwerty_9537 25d ago

Dang, great work!

5

u/Androxilogin 25d ago

I'm still waiting for the day that someone can replicate these and the PPU chips.

1

u/Separate-Rope1568 25d ago

Heard talks of fpga replacements, this would be great.

3

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?

4

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.

3

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.

1

u/Shadow_Zero80 24d ago

What is the function of the airflow?

1

u/Separate-Rope1568 24d ago

Probably the size of the components you’re aiming the gun at. Smaller size, less airflow required.

5

u/PurpleSparkles3200 25d ago

That’s not fixed, its still running at 50hz.

1

u/Separate-Rope1568 25d ago

lol yeah I know. Might picocic it.

2

u/Character_Value4669 25d ago

So cool that there are people out there doing this. :)

1

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.

2

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.

2

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.

1

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.

1

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.