SMD reflow repair of bad cartridges

[kendrick]

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.

[NFG]

Hey, that sounds fun.  Got pics of said station?

...Got pics of said laptop fire?  =D

[l_oliveira]

Next 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.

[kendrick]

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.