Having sorted out my garage I came across a lot of my old retro gaming stuff which had been “lost” for the last 9 years or so. A testament to the retro consoles build quality is that most of them still worked after given a clean and airing to get rid of the damp. A couple have needed minor repairs not from being left in the garage but from before they were stored.

The first of these was an Atari 2600 which had a cracked case, a few months ago I bought a non working VCS with a good case to make a good working and good looking console out of the 2. After I bought the second one, the first 2600 had gone missing. Well now it turned up, so I started stripping the broken one. Notice the left corner is chipped in the picture below..

There aren’t many screws to undo, two at the front and 4 towards the back in the slots you can see in this picture…

Inside they are very simple, and all I needed to do was undo a few more screws and swap over the two boards from inside the broken case into the good case. The boards can be seen below…

And after a short time I had a fully working console with a great casing, now what can I do with the empty Atari 2600 (VCS) casing???

My second fix was to my Sega Game Gear which worked on battery but not on a mains adapter, to help others out the Megadrive mains supply power pack will run the Game Gear as it’s 9v and negative tipped the same as the MD 1 power pack. So first off to split the Game Gear you need to undo 6 phillips screws (some of them are in the battery compartments) and 1 game bit screw behind the cartridge.

Once open, the top and bottom will separate, but be gentle as there are 3 connecting cables with short leads, these can be unplugged from the bottom half of the casing. You can see the three leads still attached to the side holding the screen and cartridge connector in the bottom of the pic below…

Our problem is with the power supply board which holds the power connector, and the switch as well as two of the battery compartment connectors, so we have to remove the black plastic bit from the top of the battery compartment to allow the board to slide out once the two small phillips retaining screws are removed from the two corners…

Once the board is removed you can check the continuity from the plug to the board using a multimeter, mine was OK. When I checked the back of the board I found what looked to be a crack in the solder where the centre pin connected to the board, checking from the pin to the solder blob had continuity, but when tested at the end of the trace in a little hole, nothing. So I fired up the soldering iron and resoldered the pin and made sure to melt the solder across to the trace on the circuit board to ensure a good connection (directly beneath the black circle in the pic below is the spot I soldered)…

Then I retested the continuity, and it was good. Reassemble the Game Gear and tested on the Megadrive Power supply and everything worked as it was meant to once more, saving batteries, money and the environment 😉

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