Game-Tech.US

He does get this part right, sorta, i've hooked and bent pins with 'certain' official nes black cleaner carts. The ones that are a hard felt are fine, but become useless (on the top loader at least) if soaked in just about anything, they loose their rigidity and get crushed when inserted. Some have a silk like sleeve over plastic that will grab pins and bend them as you yank it out, but are perfect for repeatedly cleaning the nes-101 connectors. All the other ones i've seen have a plastic like almost fine sand paper material covering a rigid plastic card, i.e. the pink eliminator and the grey one from Docs(?).

Paypal has everyone spoiled these days it seems! Heh Anyway, I prefer money order too, but you can get a money order from the POST OFFICE that has fraud protection as well. Mail fraud may not be as fast as credit fraud at getting money back, but I had to do it a couple times back before Paypal took over and it worked out just fine.

No, it doesn't happen very often, but i've seen a few 'new' transistors in place of the original ones on repaired top loaders. I can't really remember if i've ever had a bad rf modulator, so again, prolly doesn't happen that much. You wish you had a modded top loader? Uhh, you do!

Cool, yeah either the rf module or the transistor in the video circuit was bad.

OH, there's no silk screen on the LV huh? Weird! Cutting the resistors will brighten the pic for sure, the cap is usually necessary also.

I too use Eagle. It wasn't super hard to learn, but there's some things I don't like about too. Creating parts that weren't in the library was hard to learn and I usually have to relearn it every other time I need to do it. I tried KiCAD and Altium when I first started to learn to use such software, but since I was such a newb then I won't comment. Dave at the eevblog did a first timer of DIPTrace and I thought it looked really nice and plan to try it out some day.He also has an 8 video of pcb design, fab, assembly stuff.Not sure which one has the best support, but I recently had problems with Eagle and the only place I got any response was the eevblog forum, the 'official' eagle forum yielded ZERO responses. The eevblog forum has sections for most all the popular wares and even general sections where ppl can ask about anything about pcbs from software to fabs to assembly service, but its still pretty sparse on info. If you're in the US I suggest OSHPark for doing prototype boards, $5 per sq in, but you get 3 copies of the board. Used to be the Dorkbot pcb group buy service, but the new page is called osh (open source hardware?) and it super easy to submit a board.

By chance I ended up with a Columbia Home Arcade when I thought I was buying a lot with just a regular coleco gemini. Still not sure if I should mod it or not, it's video output is typical crap through RF. I didn't get any CHA original accessories though... Here's a pic from atariage.

Its only a test to see if it outputs any video at all, it will be dark, watch the video I linked to.

Did you try to pull video from ppu pin 21? If you don't get video there the AV mod won't help. I've seen hundreds of rusted rf modulators, it doesn't mean it doesn't work. The 3-4 troubleshooting sounds inconclusive to me. It still sounds like you have a bad ppu and/or other chips.

Just tried to load this in 6.1.0 and it fails with errors, must need to be updated to work with newer versions of Eagle.

Just because there is voltage going to them does not mean they haven't failed, if they get really hot soon after turning on that's a bad sign, but not conclusive either. No need to solder to it, I show how I use alligator clips and such to test for video out of the ppu pin 21, same can be done for audio. Watch , there are a couple other 'repair' vids on my channel too if you're interested. Probably not, the CPU does the sound and the PPU does the video so its possible to have sound with a bad PPU Yes, the switch itself grounds the signal, just check for continuity to ground while pushing the button, the signal also runs down to the .47uF cap at the front edge of the board. You should not have continuity if the switch is not pushed down, but if you do not get continuity that isn't the problem, you just won't be able to reset the console by pushing the button. I think I already explained the cap issue above? Yes see above about the audio test, but if the video transitor has failed it may also pull down the source on pin 21 so that it won't register, you can also try to pull video from bottom leg of r3? I say something about that in the vid too, its a bit more amped from there and you get a bit brighter pic. If you want just send it to me and i'll fix it up, I charge $15 each to replace cpu or ppu and $10 for srams or 373 or other smaller chips and only charge for ones that needed changed. I usually pull suspect chips and test them on another board where all the other chips are known good. I can also cheat and use a thermal camera to see hot chips soon after its powered on. The AV and other mod prices are on my website.

An LCR meter is not the same as a multimeter, most multimeters don't test capacitance and when they do they do it poorly or can't go down to 30pF, check the specs.

...what? Do they just turn off their TV and walk away? It happens, yes, not every time of course, but rarely does a customer not request it when they get the AV and other mods done.

With the another 30pF trim cap, do you have an LCR meter to test it?

There are NO fuses in the NES-001 or the NES-101, its not necessary since it can accept AC or DC input.

I can look at it, i've fixed several and have a box of parts I can swap in if needed. I can also add blue LEDs to it if you want to nix the christmas look! Have a look at my site, here is the sega cd page.

Also, what you're seeing on the green cap is just corrosion, most likely something got spilled into the power or reset button area and that's what corroded the trim caps leg, its not an electro cap so its not 'blown' and may not even be bad.

That is the trim cap for the clock circuit, i've only had one with problems, but I still had video just garbled or staticy, can't remember. If I remember all I did was reflow it's connectors and it was fine, you can turn it as much as you want and it won't really do much one way or the other on a working system, so feel free to mess with it. A bad clock circuit will give black screen though, i'm currently working on one with no clock signal and black screen boot. It did have a bad cpu and 7805 though, and so far a fix for the clock circuit eludes me, all the 'main' components work on my test unit. The reset cap - c11 - can be bad, its a .47uF electro, but it usually gives grey screen or won't reset the console when bad, not black screen.

Yup, same cpu and ppu, most of the rest of the chips are the same too.

I've done hundreds of them and black screen is bad, it usually means the cpu or ppu is bad. The 3-4 select switch is usually only the problem if the screen is nothing but static, not straight black. There is a picture of what the tv will look like if the cap is bad on my webpage for top loader mods. Here is the I made of how I do the mod.

Youtube vid:

After looking at it, i'm interested in why s-rgb pin 9 is lifted, but I also see it's for use with the superCIC, which seems to only do 50hz pal or 60hz ntsc, not a 50hz ntsc, according to mmmonkeys info.

Well I think if the mod is switched or switchless won't matter, I'm betting turning a PAL console in to a NTSC console is not a problem for most ppl in PAL territory since most PAL tvs can do NTSC with no issues, but the opposite is just not the case for NTSC territories.

No one has any ideas? The creator of this mod is on vacation and not replying to email.

Here's a I did recently on how to repair adapters.