bringing back to life dead genesis carts

[final fight cd]

i do clean my contact points on all my systems. just not regularly. i will normally take a cloth that is normally used to clean lens on cameras, which is very thin. i wrap it around a credit card, tap some water on it and insert it. i do this whenever i get a second hand system. usually the cloth turns on black and dirty. i get a sense of accomplishment when i do this for some reason.

besides investing in a brand name cart system like you recommended, do you think this is adequate? do you have a better way?

[Ziggy]

The credit cart method is alright, as long as it's thick enough with what ever cloth you're using. Too thin and it wont scrub the pins good enough, too thick and it'll be pushing the pins out too far. You pretty much want it to be the thickness of a cart's PCB to be on the safe side. Maybe a little thicker would be good so it can scrub the pins a little more, but again, you don't want it too thick.

Other than that, you really don't wanna be using water. Use rubbing alcohol, as pure as you can get it. You can usually find 91% (or whatever it is) in most drug stores and whatnot, use this rather than the 70% (or whatever it is).

[final fight cd]

a question for ziggy or hobie-wan. or i guess anybody else. hopefully one of you read this.

i picked up a sega cd model 1 some weeks ago. it worked like a dream for the first week or two and than it just decided to shit the bed. it powers on, but it freezes at the bios screen. every single time. i googled it and one of the first results was a link over to the sega-16 forums - somebody else was complaining of the exact same problem. a member said that the capacitors needed replaced.

i finally have some free time and was planning on replacing some capacitors in a few dead carts, which seems easy enough. but would changing capacitors in the sega cd be just as easy?

also, i think i might invest in a capacitor tester to help with the process. i think the member over at sega-16 said there are 10-15 capacitors. obviously, i don't want to replace all if i don't have to.

does this even sound like a capacitor problem? i have cleaned up the contact points, i have tried multiple segas and its always the same result.

[Hobie-wan]

I still need to order caps to fix my GGs, but if you find a bad cap in any device that's a certain brand, you should at the very least replace every cap in that device that's from the same company and they're likely all bad.

[Ziggy]

Not to mention that given the age you should replace them regardless. The extra time it would take would be minimal since you already got the console open and apart already.

The bitch about capacitors, I find, is finding out the value. Or is there something I'm missing? Reading resistors is easy, but I find a lot of caps that have nonsense printed on them, or nothing at all. Is there something I don't know? Or would a cap tester read the value?

[Troglodyte]

Is there something I don't know? Or would a cap tester read the value?

It seems that at least some of the cap testers out there are able to read and display the capacitance.

See here:
http://www.drillspot.com/products/75537 ... tor_Tester

Funny thing is, although I obviously knew that multi-meters / volt-meters existed, as I have used one for years, I had no idea that that actual electronic capicitor testers even existed at all; let alone that they could be tested while in-circuit.

Reading resistors is easy

I also learned long ago, that reading resistors in-circuit leads to in accurate values, do to the multimeter reading the actual resistors of inline components / the circuit itself. I'd assume that this is still true given current testing equipment;
is this correct?

[final fight cd]

so i am finally getting the ball rolling on this project: i went out in search of capacitors today. i opened a cart and saw that the rating for the cap is 4.7 microfaradad and 16V. when i went to radio shack i was able to find a match for the uF but not for the voltage. i was only able to pick up 4.7 uf and 35V caps. will this work? do i need a closer match? do i need an exact match? is it better to shoot under the voltage or over?

[Hobie-wan]

so i am finally getting the ball rolling on this project: i went out in search of capacitors today. i opened a cart and saw that the rating for the cap is 4.7 microfaradad and 16V. when i went to radio shack i was able to find a match for the uF but not for the voltage. i was only able to pick up 4.7 uf and 35V caps. will this work? do i need a closer match? do i need an exact match? is it better to shoot under the voltage or over?

That will work fine. The farad rating needs to be the same, but the voltage can be higher.

[final fight cd]

thank you hobie-wan, ziggy, and anybody else. i appreciate it.

[AznKhmerBoi]

I have roughly 100 genesis games cart. From my experience i have had little problems booting the games and for the few that didnt work i used the official sega genesis cleanit cartridge for the cart and it works great! It looks like long genesis cartridge and you just insert the game in a few times and it cleans the innards.