The SNES I almost fixed
I picked up and non-working Super Nintendo on eBay, figuring I could fix it up. And I probably will eventually; but for now, it’s got me beat.
It’s very yellow. Through and through. Hopefully I can retrobrite this back to life; probably when I go visit Mike from Retro Tech or Die later this month. He’s got a pretty good Retrobrite setup.
But after the necessary recapping, since I don’t trust 30 year old capacitors, no matter what brand they are, and replacing the fuse, it turned on! I figured that was it! Boy was I wrong.
The sound is fine. A little scratchy, but I had HAL’s Hole In One Golf as a kid, and I recall that startup screen always having that scratch, so that was a surprise when I heard it, but it’s not actually a problem.
The video, on the other hand, is a disaster. On the upside, it is running properly as far as the CPU goes, and that’s the most common fault. I dodged a bullet there. However, without spare PPU1 and PPU2 chips to test with, I won’t be able to complete the diagnosis or repair very quickly.
The donor board arrives…
So the donor board for the PPU1 and PPU2 chips arrived. It’s a SHVC model, but those chips can be interchangeable. It’s just the sound chips that you can swap between them.
I haven’t really done any SMD work before at any scale, so I decided to start with the donor board, in case I screw up and rip up traces, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
I get out my heat gun, which is really just for low temp stuff like shrink wrap, and works well for melting away stray strands of PLA after a print; and it takes a fair bit of time and frustration, but the chip comes off, nice and clean. This feels like it’s going to be fairly easy now!
So I’ve got the replacement PPU1 chip off the old board. It’s an original, not the revision A that I’m replacing, but the pinouts are the same and functionally it’s the same, so it shouldn’t matter. I’m feeling pretty good about this. A little too good. I go to do the same on the recipient board. The RGB-01 board that I want to make my daily driver… and I fuck that up, Ripped up 3 traces. so this needs some serious repair work. That’s for another day.
The Oops Board
I also ordered a “working” board. It’s a SHVC-01 board, and the picture and sound aren’t great, and the case was a mess. And by a mess, I mean it had a lot of broken bits in the bottom half of the base.
I recapped this board with a set of nice, pretty, red Wurth caps. Including the ones in the SHVC sound unit.
Removing this board from the bottom of the case also broke all of the standoffs, so that’s no longer salvageable.
But it did supply a nice top case.
Today (5/25/23) I took the top case of the new machine and the bottom case of the RGB-01 machine and Retro-brighted them. Although it wasn’t super warm here in Rhode Island today, I did get a fairly good retro-bright. The top case look about perfect now, the controller ports look decent, and the bottom went from looking like it came from a Smoker’s house, to just lightly sun abused. I might do it again for the bottom, but honestly it looks so much better now that I’m ok with it.
Putting it back together
Putting everything back together at this point is simple and I’m back to a nice, clean, happy SNES.
And I’m ready for a few rounds of HAI’s Hole-In-One Golf!
