Atari Lynx Repair ...An Epic Tale

[Music] hello and welcome back to kester's Forest now in the late 80s and the early 90s there were three contenders for the crown of King of the handheld consoles they were of course the Nintendo Game Boy the Sega Game Gear and the Atari Links now of course the Atari link sadly came third in the race but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a lot to offer it had 16-bit color Graphics a backlit LCD screen and stereo sound and of course atari's famously good back catalog of games but sadly it did have an atrocious battery life and a full set of Six Double A's would sometimes last you only a couple of hours now I never owned an Atari Lynx but a couple of people at school did so I did get to have a go on one I think it was a lynx model one and of course there was the game shop in my town where I got to play on one too now I managed to pick up myself a nice broken links to off eBay for around about 60 pounds these things can go for quite a lot of money when they're in fully working conditions so I thought I'd try my chances and try and pick one up broken and see if I can't fix it now there's no telling I'm actually going to succeed but there are a couple of things I can try and I'm willing to spend a little bit of money to try and get there I can try recapping it and replacing the power supply and things like that and if I succeed I've also grabbed a few modifications including a nice backlit IPS screen from benven so I've got all my stuff together I'm going to take you through the process and let's see how I get on let's take a look now as mentioned there are two models of the links the version one the big one and then the revised Atari Links 2 and that's what I've got myself here now this was sold as broken you can see there are a few notes there on the back and this has already been taken apart but if we open it up here and look at the back you'll see that the rubber grips are missing from where the screws have been accessed and here they are but you can see they're in a little bit of rough shape so hopefully I can find myself some Replacements now there's the the famous backlight that sucks all the energy out of this but I'm just gonna disconnect the motherboard and take a look at the front now underneath this piece of plastic is a membrane that can go wrong and also here this is where the power circuit lies and this also is known to go wrong in particular this diode here so I'm going to load it up with batteries and give it a look and see what we got and as you can see it's powering on there is some life in it but uh yeah nothing else happening no sound no games playing I've got a game in there just in case you're wondering because the links to won't power on without a game inside but yeah it seems to be completely dead and just taking a look at the notes Here we got bad screen lines uh yeah yeah I can see something there PCB issue no gameplay no sound LED on only LED okay so oh yes yes you can see that although it's very faint and the camera's picking this up better than I saw with my own eyes but yes the LED is there so it's getting power basically so it's very possible that just the backlight is working and not the actual processors themselves so we're gonna have to have a look at that and while we're at it I also picked up a few games to test with so got Batman Returns there uh Toki which looks pretty fun I played that on the Amiga I seem to remember and right which is also supposed to be quite good fun but you know I don't have a lot of experience with Lynx games and these three are known to be quite good and I got them all three for 20 pounds so yeah not bad I also just wanted to stop and look at just how thin these cards are I I have a thing for these thin Hue card type games like the links and the PC engine Etc I think the ROM chip here where it's sort of slightly discolored that is just the game there and I always used to blow my mind as a child how small they were so this is the list of capacitors with a diagram for the Atari Links 2 that came with them and here are the Caps themselves from digital Delights that I've bought from these guys before off of eBay they are come highly recommended from me uh never had any problems and here also is the replacement power circuit for both the links one and links two you can see what we've got in there the diode de mosfet the transistors and a resistor oh I'm going to replace all of the capacitors at once and it doesn't say on this diagram where the negative and positive sides are so I'm going to go through now and mark them all off for future reference that way I can take them all out without having to remember which way round they went [Music] this RF shielding is a bit of a problem because we've got one capacitor right in the middle here and in order to gain access I'm going to have to desolder a few of these points on the copper shielding here so they can then fold it back and gain access to the underside [Music] so just going through and marking off all the negative points on the diagram now [Music] at the time I didn't have a desoldering gun so I just melted the solder here and lifted up at the same time with a pair of tweezers and once I was able to pull it back just held it in place with a bit of masking tape now I do have a bit of braid so I'm just going to flow this and try and desolder using the old method and it was a bit of a pain but I got it out just a bit of IPA to clean it up and then I'm going to bend the legs to take the strain off the capacitor itself sort of just outwards and then in again and that way they fit the hole from above without having to bend and put too much pressure at the bottom of the capacitor [Music] thank you foreign [Music] and after a quick tidy up I'm just going to put a bit of Capstone tape down here just to replace the tape that was already there and prevent any shorts against the shielding [Music] now while you see me high speed scrub the board here you'll see that I've actually now removed all the capacitors from the rest of the board there's no need to painfully watch me do that and now I'm going to balance this on some a roll of tape here just to give myself a bit of clearance and then I'm just going to pop them all in before soldering them on the reverse side foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] to clean the volume and contrast Wheels with some contact cleaner and give the cartridge pins a very gentle scrub [Music] so the Moment of Truth powering on and we got the lights but uh yeah there's a game in there and yet nothing I'm just checking the sound and the contrast wheel there's nothing nothing changing nothing happening it does appear to be just as before so I think we're going to have to turn our attention to the power circuit here and you can see these are the different components that we got replacements for but this particular diode here this zener diode seems to be online the one that goes the most so we're gonna have a quick look now I don't really know what I'm doing here but I do know that that the uh I'm in diode mode here this is supposed to be different in one direction from the other and it's exactly the same so I'm not 100 sure but it does sort of indicate that there is something wrong with the power circuit so I'm gonna remove these components and replace them with the ones I got there's no harm done there I've already got them I don't have a soldering gun so yet again I'm going to have to use some some just some solder and some flux and a bit of patience to get these off but yeah this is the zener diode and then I'm also going to take off the transistors and the mosfet and that resistor as well so here we go thank you [Music] lots of patients required on the mosfet because there's this big ground plane underneath that needs to be fully desoldered and soldered back it's also uh worth noting at this point that I discovered another trick you can do just to test the links Itself by bypassing this power circuit uh maybe it's a bit late now but uh yeah if you've got a USB uh USB a socket there and actually solder it up to this point here against the um against where one of the capacitors in you can just plug this in and get five volts straight into the motherboard and as you can see it's powered on it's a nice strong LED there however still nothing which indicates really that the power circuit wasn't going to help us anyway so what I've done is I've powered it on now and I'm actually just searching with my finger to see if there are any hot components anything heating up faster than the others and yeah if you look carefully you can actually see this chip in the middle here this one is one of the two main chips to the board you can see it's actually heating up quite a bit and I'm spraying contact cleaner on there and it's clearing out faster than the others and one of these RAM chips these two RAM chips and the right hand are sort of in the middle of the screen there that's also heating up quite a bit [Music] now RAM chips are quite cheap they're five pound for a pair so I thought why don't I start with that so I have now by this point got myself a desoldering gun so I'm gonna have a go at those now I managed to get one out fairly easily uh there's a few holes here but I'll clean that up later but as you can see the second one is again under this copper shielding but this time it's also being blocked by the card slot the card pins so in order for me to gain complete access I'm gonna have to take that out too which isn't really what I wanted to do and it was a pain but yes I did manage to get that out intact without tearing any of the other pins so there we go everything's out now and you can see that both RAM chips have been removed so I'm going to give it a quick clean up here and then I'm going to tuck in the new ones and solder those back in [Music] [Music] oh [Music] so did it work um it did not well it was worth a try anyway so the next thing I'm going to try and do is actually replace this chip in the middle here and you can actually buy New Old Stock from this site here best electronics in the US and this is run by a guy called Brad and he's been running it for quite some time now and he basically has all the worldwide stock of uh basically unused parts for Atari games and consoles so this is the place to go and as you can see it's a very old school looking website and when my package arrived it had some really great sort of uh bits of literature in there about reviews he's had over the years and you can just see how long these guys have actually been in business and they really do kind of own the market so what I got myself here is uh some new rubber grips that's pretty cool some Brand New Old Stock of that this is a replacement speaker that was recommended to get which apparently is a lot louder and I got myself three games Road blasters stun Runner and California games and they came nicely packaged in little bits of bubble wrap here so this really is a recommended site now this is the main event this is the Susie chip which is the smaller of the two chips on the board the other one being the Mickey and they are both surface mounted so I've got myself a heat gun now and really it's just a case of heating this up gently uh for about I don't know three or four minutes until the solder melts and then you just gently lift the chip off the board and we'll see that now there we go off it comes that's a little bit of patience there now what I've actually done earlier was test these capacitors for shorts and they were actually shorting but you can hear now that they are no longer shorting which does indicate there was an issue with the chip and it was basically broken and causing a short on the board so now we've got it off we'll give it a bit of a clean and then we'll drop in the new one so yeah just uh giving that bit of flux holding it into place and then heating it up gently again and then applying a little bit of pressure and it should just fall into place and start to make contact so yeah just applying a bit of pressure there and then I'm going to use my multimeter to test continuity against all of these pins and make sure they're making good contact with the board [Music] well so far not so good unfortunately it didn't work after all that we're still getting the same thing absolutely nothing except for power getting to that backlight now I'm really getting to the point where I spent so much money on this I really should have just bought a working one in the first place but it just so happens I came across a listing on eBay for another broken links but this time with a bunch of games now again it was around about 60 pounds and the games themselves are worth that so I thought well if I buy this I've got the games and I've got another links maybe just maybe I can swap across that chip and see if the other main chip might be faulty and maybe on this one it works well I did that and guess what it didn't work nope absolutely nothing same problem as usual but I haven't really lost anything here because I've just bought some games so I did what any sane person would do at this point and that is give up and buy a working one I just want to play games at this point and I have still got the modifications so I found another listing for a decent price and a screen that was a little defective so kind of worth uh worth maybe slightly less than a fully working one I grabbed that and well here's what happened next [Music] okay so yeah that's a promising start we've actually got a game working uh so that's that's excellent that's better than we've had so far and yeah you can see the screen is a little defective there you can see some bright pixels showing up and over the screen here you can see them too and the sound also working that's great so yeah we got ourselves a working links which is more than I can say for the previous efforts [Music] and here is the package from benven first up we got this which is the El Cheapo SD which is essentially a flash cut for the Atari link so I'm going to be enjoying some games on that later just take some micro SD in there and then here's the main event this is the LCD IPS screen with a built-in board all ready to go and this 3D printed bracket which apparently helps line it up with the screen and then this is the ribbon cable that you just plug in and here's the new speaker that I got from Brad at Best electronics and he says this is much louder than the original so I'm just gonna pop out the original uh just on the plastic casing here and then clip in the new one it's as simple as that [Music] well this is truly plug and play but you do have the additional option of toggling on some scan lines which I would like to do so in order to do that you need to just solder that wire on there to the bottom pad where it says scan lines and then when you drop in the screen solder the other end of the wire to one of the pins so I'm just going to make sure that this screen is now lined up in the middle as best as I can and then this bracket should finish that off by hope helping with the alignment it's a 3D printed bracket and it uses the same screws that came with the case so you're just reusing those in the same holes and this is where the other end of the wire goes it's the fourth pin along on the top row here underneath the cartridge slot and then you just need to remove this coil as well because it's no longer needed reinsert the ribbon cable for the front panel here and the IPS screen instead of the usual one here and then just slot the other end of the ribbon cable into the board here and it's uh as easy as that [Music] well I think you can tell by the sound I made that I'm pretty happy with that [Music] and I just wanted to say at this point that I replaced the casing with one of the ones that I had in better condition and recapped the new links as well so we are all good to go [Music] [Music] oh [Music] honestly the relief I'm feeling at this point having finally got here and have this thing working is quite immense so yeah I'm gonna play a little bit of Batman I'm not very good at this game I did get a little bit better but it's it's quite hard these enemies do just seem to have this amazing ability to fall onto you when they die and that really doesn't help the graphics as you can see for a you know a 1990 handheld are pretty impressive and here's Road blasters and what you can see here is it's actually extremely vibrant on the screen but in reality the screen itself is even brighter and more colorful than I'm able to pick up on the camera here which is really quite something it looks great on here I played this on the other screen uh before and it was very washed out very pale and here it just looks clean and crisp and bright colorful and you can really just have a good timeout I actually really enjoy this game it's very simple but a lot of fun and then finally we have Ninja Gaiden now if I press this here you'll see scan lines coming on that's how you operate the scan lines you can actually toggle through using the backlight button to turn the screen off completely turn it on using the standard settings with no scan lines and then scan lines on again there and that's my preferred way to play because it looks the most authentic whilst maintaining all the benefits of the IPS screen with the viewing angles and all of the colors but what about that new speaker well let's have a listen [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you foreign [Applause] and I'm really really pleased with the results although it was quite a journey to get there I think in the end I spent about seven months trying to get this thing working I I bought three different lynxes off of eBay I had to get parts over from the US and I had to order all the bits from benven in Australia and on that note I just wanted to say thank you to Ben because Ben saw my previous video on the game gear and uh really liked it and as a thank you he sent me a discount code to buy the screen for the link so I saved a little bit of money there thank you Ben that was really really kind of you so I probably spent a bit more than I wanted to actually getting the links working in the end but actually got some quite good deals on games and modifications I don't feel like I've wasted my time I've learned quite a lot along the way about components and soldering putting things on taking them off again I got quite good at recapping so you know I think you know it's not really a wasted effort if you enjoy yourselves and I did enjoy myself it was it was good fun and I'm really happy with the result notes that speaker's great I didn't know you could get those so thank you Brad for recommending that the screen is obviously amazing and I've got a ton of games to play on including now of course that that uh that SD card reader which means I can now access some of the more expensive games that I wouldn't usually be able to get my hands on well let me know down in the comments if you've had a go at this and if you've had an absolute nightmare trying to get an attire readings working are there any other things I could try because I do still have a couple of sort of boards in bits it's possible I may one day be able to get one of them working that's it for this week thank you and I'll see you next time on kester's Forest foreign [Music]

Channel: Kester's Forest

Views: 1,791

Keywords: Atari, Lynx, Atari Lynx, Atari Lynx 2, IPS, Mod, Modification, Repair, recap, capacitor, replacement, screen, Benn Venn, ElCheapoSD, el cheapo SD, backlit, backlight, batman returns, ninja gaiden, stun runner, roadblasters, s.t.u.n. runner, solder, upgrade, best electronics, speaker

Id: mfGl1GP5drw

Length: 23min 37sec (1417 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2023