Those of you with no life may remember that last year, my lovely girlfriend bought me an SMD rework station. I attempted to repair a wonderful HP Omnibook laptop with said device, and promptly set the computer on fire. :)
I've since learned how to use the thing correctly, setting temperature and airflow correctly. To cut a long story short, I was able to revive a broken Game Boy cartridge by reflowing all the solder over the MBC and the memory chip. I knew instinctively from the behavior of the game in its slot that there was a problem accessing certain portions of the ROM. A good solid cleaning eliminated the cart contacts and the slot contacts as failure points.
Just wanted to share. I don't promise that this will revive all broken cartridges, but it's certainly worth a shot in the right hands. Next up? I try to fix my busted Alisia Dragoon cart and my broken ASCII Playstation pad.
Hey, that sounds fun. Got pics of said station?
...Got pics of said laptop fire? =D
Quote from: kendrick on October 30, 2008, 11:22:16 AMNext up? I try to fix my busted Alisia Dragoon cart
Busted mega drive cartridge ?
I once had a Columns cartridge (it broke in 1992) that suddenly stopped working.
Years later (1994) I connected it to a "Mega KEY" cartridge accidentally (I thought it was a Sonic cartridge and I didn't notice the label) and it ended working.
After opening the "Mega KEY" adapter and some minor reverse engineering on it's circuitry I noticed that it had a 2k2 resistor on the pin A17 of the mega drive cartridge slot line (it's the 68000 A1 line).
I repaired the Columns cartridge by adding an 2k2 resistor internally. After that I repaired at least four other cartridges with the same trick.
I believe that the mask rom chip blowing has something to do with the GND (Side A Pin 18) pin right next to the address line pin (Side A pin 17) and the cartridge being inserted misaligned or with the system power on.
Thanks for the tip about the resistor, I'm going to try that. As for pictures of the rework station, it's this item here:
http://www.amazon.com/Aoyue-968-Digital-Rework-Station/dp/B000HDG0AO
No, there are no pictures of the laptop fire. Wasn't pausing to preserve that moment with photography at the time. :)