Sound completely absent.
6 repair logs
+49 photosSuccessful repairSony — PlayStation
Imported NTSC-J PlayStation sent in for the full works: xStation, MFO and X-Reset installs, plus a recap and a clean. Board and PSU recaps went in without trouble, then the console came up dead, no video and no audio, once the mods were fitted. The MFO had been wired to a pad that is ground on one board revision but not on this PU-18, which shorted the 3.5V rail and blew the PS604 fuse. Rewired correctly and refitted with a fuse taken from another console, with the surrounding fuses and ferrite beads checked for further damage. Finished with a controller clean and recap, lubrication and UV protectant.
+57 photosSuccessful repairSega — Game Gear
Had lunch with a couple of friends and one of them brought a Sega Game Gear along, wondering if anything could be done with it. Power LED only, nothing else.
+135 photosPartial fixSega — Wondermega
Absolute labour of love on this Sega Wondermega HWM-5010 from Japan: corrosion, missing components, broken traces and a RAM package with broken legs. The Mega Drive side eventually came back to life; the Mega-CD side continues to freeze on the BIOS animation, defying everything thrown at it.
+17 photosSuccessful repairSega — Game Gear
This Japanese Sega Game Gear went through a lot: a full IPS LCD mod with speaker upgrade, FM sound module and glass lens, then a trip to the floor courtesy of a curious one-year-old that tore the flex cables. A clock-line bodge wire and a barely-surviving TP10 pad later, everything was restored.
+15 photosPartial fixSega — Game Gear
Two heavily contaminated Sega Game Gears, so badly that components were falling off the boards from the electrolyte. Many hours in, one has a partially defective screen and the other boots and plays audio with no picture. A partial result after a massive effort.
+12 photosSega — Game Gear
The first Game Gear, bought in 2020 as working and arriving with a black screen: it powered on and did nothing else. The solder had gone dull, which was the capacitors leaking rather than anyone's bad workmanship. A recap brought the picture back, but it was done with a RetroSix ceramic cap kit, a mistake corrected years later. Audio stayed dead until a break in continuity between two capacitors on the audio board was bridged with a snipped capacitor leg. It was later fitted with rechargeable cells charged over USB-C, and a Syf audio board with improved grounding. In 2025 the ceramics finally came out for proper electrolytics, and both of those mods moved across to an IPS-screen unit so this one could go back to stock.
