Hey everyone, it's Colin. How's it goin'?
Recently, I picked up one of these: a SEGA Game Gear. It's something I always wanted as a kid.
And I think I got a pretty good deal. For $30,
I got the Game Gear itself, plus an AC adapter, a car power charger,
*and* the one thing that a lot of kids wanted from back in the day, the TV Tuner module.
And I'll tell you a story about *that* at the end of the video.
And, I think the $30 was a pretty good deal. The Game Gear itself is cosmetically in excellent shape.
However, before I go and clean it up, because it is a bit dirty, I do need to do a bit of a repair.
And this is a very common problem with the Game Gear, and that is the sound just doesn't work.
The reason why the sound doesn't work on so many Game Gears is
because while SEGA put a lot of money into manufacturing these well,
unfortunately, they cheaped out on one very important but small component.
And that is the capacitors on the circuit boards.
Over time, these capacitors dry out and just stop working.
And unfortunately, when they dry out, they can also cause damage to the circuit boards.
So today, I'm going to show you how I took mine apart, cleaned it up, and got the capacitors replaced inside.
Now, I do need to note that this can be an advanced repair.
depending on the specific parts that you're using, which capacitors need to get replaced,
and also if there's any damage that the leaking or the dying capacitors that you're taking out
caused on the circuit boards.
As you'll see, mine was a bit challenging to do, not only because of the parts that I used to replace it with,
but also due to some of that damage, so just keep that in mind.
This isn't necessarily something that you'll want to tackle
if you're a beginner at soldering or doing any sort of board-level repairs.
Of course, before we can do the repair, we need to get the Game Gear taken apart and this is pretty easy.
There are six Philip head screws around the perimeter on the back side.
Two of them are hiding inside the battery compartments.
There's also a single Gamebit-headed screw in the cartridge bay that needs to get removed.
SEGA was just a little bit sneaky, I guess, with the tamper protection.
The Game Gear then splits in half and you'll see that some boards stay on the front half and some boards stay on the back.
There are some cable assemblies that hold the two halves together.
Carefully pull them out; they are gonna be a little stiff,
especially if the Game Gear has never been taken apart before or its older,
but just be gentle and they'll pop out of their sockets.
After you've gotten two halves separated, then simply undo the four screws that hold in this metal shield.
and then the two screws that hold down the audio board.
The audio board will then just lift out. It's a lot easier to take this out of the Game Gear to work on.
Now, on that audio circuit board, there are five capacitors.
Note however, that they are surface-mount, and that's what makes this job particularly tough.
Surface-mount parts are always harder to work on than through-hole.
Also, because of the style of the capacitors that they used at the factory, it's not that easy to tell visually if they failed.
But 99% of the time, if you're having audio problems on a Game Gear, it is due to bad capacitors,
so you're really just gonna want to replace them all.
Don't try to fare it out which particular one is bad, just assume they're all bad and get replacements.
The easiest place to buy capacitors is going in the form of a kit, and there are a lot of sellers online, on eBay,
that either sell just the caps you need for that audio board, or a complete cap kit for the entire Game Gear.
There are some other failure modes with the Game Gear, especially related to the screen,
that can also be attributed to dying or leaking capacitors.
So, if you've got other problems with your Game Gear, other than just the audio,
you may wanna ahead and just replace all the caps in it, and in this video, I'm only showing the audio repair,
but the principles are really the same for doing the rest of the caps.
If you decide to get a full cap kit, generally, you're only going to spend about $10.
They're usually pretty inexpensive.
The one thing to watch for is that you're getting good-quality caps.
Caps made by companies like Panasonic or Nichicon are really highly rated,
they're made in Japan, they're gonna last forever.
It's a good idea to put quality parts back in,
'cause otherwise, you're just gonna be tearing back into your Game Gear a few years to replace
the capacitors again if you put crap ones in.
So, spend a little bit more money and buy better parts.
So we've got our replacement caps and we've also got the audio board taken out.
This is where things get a bit challenging and it also depends on how badly your capacitors have failed.
All of these are surface-mounts, so you should be able to go at the surface-mount solder pads
with some desoldering braid to at least try to loosen things up.
Sometimes, these caps are glued down at the factory,
and that's gonna present an extra little challenge, but it shouldn't be too bad.
The process that I generally followed was to try to desolder both legs of the capacitor if I could,
and then use the heat from the soldering iron to try and pry the capacitor up and away from the board.
What I found is that a lot of these capacitors were leaking on the underside of them.
Unfortunately, they tended to damage the solder pads.
I got very lucky in that some of these solder pads looked like they were just completely gone,
but with a bit of careful cleaning, I was able to find some clean spots left on these pads to retin with fresh solder.
Now, you may not be as lucky.
If your capacitors leak so badly that they damaged the solder pads so much
that you can't get solder to stick to them anymore,
honestly, your best bet is going to be to try and find a new audio board on eBay or
maybe find a parts Game Gear or something like that.
But assuming that you do have some solder pad left that solder will stick to,
get the capacitors taken off and note the polarity.
Thankfully, SEGA labeled the polarity of each of the capacitors
on that circuit board, so it's easy to tell which side is positive and which side is negative.
On your new capacitors, the side with the stripe is going to be the negative side.
And it should be labeled in the stripe with a little dash to indicate negative.
So when you're laying out your capacitors,
make sure that you're laying out positive to positive and negative to negative.
The capacitor will not work correctly if you solder it in backwards,
so be very careful to get this right the first time.
The other challenge is that the capacitors that I'm using here and the kind that come with most kits
are designed for through-hole use, and of course, we're replacing surface-mount capacitors.
This isn't the end of the world, but it does take a little bit of ingenuity
and some careful thought before you start just soldering capacitors back down.
You'll notice that I had to solder all of mine down kind of sideways, and do a little bit of careful routing.
It's important to make sure that when you are laying these capacitors out
that they aren't going to get in the way of any other components
and of course, that when you've got them all laying down like this,
the board will still fit back into the Game Gear itself.
A couple of times, I actually dropped the board back into that rear housing and tried to figure out
where I could lay capacitors in such a way that it wouldn't interfere with holding the board in
or any vertical clearances, just making sure that those capacitors aren't sticking up so much
that they're getting in the way of something else.
So with those capacitors in place, there's nothing left to do but to get the Game Gear put back together.
It's as simple as the reverse of how you took it apart.
Then, just drop in some double A batteries, along the game cartridge,
turn the game console on, and crank it up.
[♪ Sonic 2 Game Gear Title ♪]
If everything went according to plan, you should now be reveling in the wonderful 8-bit audio of the Game Gear.
So I mentioned at the beginning of the video that my Game Gear came with the TV Tuner module,
and that reminds me of a story from when I was a little kid.
One of my classmates in elementary school had a Game Gear.
Of course, most everyone else had a Game Boy, but he had a Game Gear,
and he also had the TV Tuner module for it.
And one day, we got the idea, "You know, why don't you bring your Game Gear to school,
and we could sneak it out on the playground during recess...
and you could plug the TV Tuner and we could, you know, watch cartoons?"
And, that was a great idea, so...
Couple of days later, he brings it to school with his TV Tuner module...
and we do just that, we managed to sneak it out
onto the playground during recess and we go hide in one corner of the playground
so that the teachers couldn't see us and everything.
And, we got it all put together and that big, massive long antenna stickin' up there in the air and...
and, you know, we were super excited, "Hey, this is gonna be awesome! We're-
gonna get to watch cartoons and Inspector Gadget and stuff during recess. This is going to be awesome!"
And we finally tuned the station in...
and its, "Oh, we're gonna watch cartoons! This is gonna be awesome!"
And it's...
soap operas.
That's... all that was on.
Any broadcast station that we could tune in. Soap operas.
Yeah. So, suddenly, the TV Tuner for the Game Gear...
just didn't seem as cool...
to us anymore and we didn't...
bother to try to...
pull that stunt again.
But anyway,
hopefully this video was helpful to you in your own journey to get the Game Gear repaired.
Unfortunately, I think this is gonna be become an even more common repair as time goes on
and more of these units fail.
I would even go so far as to say that if your own Game Gear hasn't failed yet, even if it's working perfectly,
go ahead and start planning out to do this repair because
it's just a matter of time before it succumbs to the same bad capacitors
that all the other Game Gears have.
So, if you like the video, I would appreciate a thumbs-up. Those help quite a bit.
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And, as always, thank you all so much for watching.