I recently recovered a Sega Game Gear from a box full of junk: the seller told me that probably it wouldn't work, so he sold it for a very small amount of money, but sadly had no games to go with it.
As soon as I got home I tried powering it up using batteries: It turned on but it also left me with a black screen and a very dim backlight illumination (the black screen turned out to be normal on the original Game Gear units without BIOS).
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| My repaired Game Gear |
Keep reading if You're interested in some nasty repairs ;-)
While searching for information about the console I ran into
THIS great page about a common problem present in early GG units: faulty capacitors on the main and audio boards.
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| Game Gear mainboard (VA1 model) |
I ordered a game (Sonic 2) from Amazon and in the meantime opened the thing up to check for problems: a few capacitors leaked (and in one place the corrosive fluid ate away part of a circuit trace) so I undertook the nasty job of doing a full capacitor replacement on all the boards. I also fixed the corroded trace on the circuit. All the capacitors that need replacement were surface-mounted ones and I had only normal barrel-type electrolytic ones around, so had to be very careful fitting them as their size could prevent the console plastic shell from correctly closing up.
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| On the right of C54 is the trace that got corroded |
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| Some replaced capacitors |
Today (around a week after I finished the repairs) my test cart finally got here, and everything turned out to be working fine (backlight also got much brighter after the cap replacement)! And now i can go play the only game i own ... :-P
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