Game Gears will always need a recap unless they have already been done. They are one of the consoles that absolutely need it. They suffer from leakage, which causes corrosion. Left unchecked it can cause significant damage.
This one came in, likely the same, but it would boot and the red light would come on. That is, it would come on until the screen brightness was increased then the system would turn off.
That is really an early symptom of bad capacitors, so is actually a good sign. There was no sound output, which is expected, and it would shut off before the screen became properly visible. The main pic shows some of the old capacitors.
As always with these, it isn’t really possible to know the state of the screen until it has been recapped. It makes it a bit of an unknown, sadly. They often need the screen replaced as well but you can never truly tell until it has been recapped.
You can see in the images the capacitors removed and the pads cleaned. The corrosion can make it difficult to melt the solder, acting as an insulating layer and affecting the composition of the solder itself. It helps to scrape them first to remove most of the worst but also to apply the heat to the capacitor leg as much as possible so it melts from the inside, out. Lifted a pad on this one unfortunately but it’s not a problem. This pad has very little trace connected to it to distribute heat away, so it is quite vulnerable. Checking the schematic, it connects to the adjacent transistor and another one nearby, which the trace still does. It will be reconnected with a thin wire when we’re done.
There are three boards in a Game Gear. The pics here show one side of the main board. There is also a sound board, with surface mounted capacitors, which is always quite bad for corrosion, and the power board which also suffers.
With everything recapped and back together it’s time to test it and see whether the screen also needs to be replaced. It seems more often than not that they do. There are three chips below the visible bottom edge of the screen that are glued on to the glass of the screen itself. They convert the signals from the Game Gear and each control one third of the screen vertically. It is common to find one third, or more of the screen has vertical lines or no output. It’s a symptom of one or more of these chips beginning to detach itself from the glass and the invisible carbon traces of the screen. There is usually very little you can do to restore it.
It is very occasionally possible to apply heat to the problematic chip with an iron and press, but it is only ever a temporary fix, assuming it doesn’t make matters worse. The lines will quickly return. As you can see, it is curtains for this one. It is going to need a new screen. We will put it to one side for now and come back to it.
