PC Engine Trash to Treasure (Pt1) - Restoring NEC's 8bit Wonder

this episode is supported by monster joysticks calm level up your Raspberry Pi with our all-in-one arcade kit using genuine San where arcade parts and one click print comm for your photos on canvas acrylic gifts and more local craftsman and global delivery ello cave-dwellers welcome to the cave it's the turn today of the pc engine a machine that never officially hit the shores of the UK although that's all about to change thanks to the release of the upcoming pc engine mini and it was inspired really by this month's edition of retro gamer magazine which covers the pc engine I'm sure many of you are subscribed to that but it just reminded me that I have this big old junky box full of PC engine gear most of it courtesy of Chrissy Chrissy thank you for sending this in a long long time ago it's about time that we got around to fixing this up so let's see what we've got in the box and get an idea what we might be able to make out of all of these bits right well where do we start then clearly we've got the cd-rom system over here and immediately you can see taped to the top are some damaged cogs so we're definitely gonna need to do something about that it's good of Christie to put them on there because that helps us to troubleshoot this a little bit more quickly hopefully we've got two PC engines or at least the shells of two that one's still in there now they didn't arrive like this I did open them up to check for any obvious problems leaking capacitors and such like so that's why they're open and we've got an interface unit here which the cd-rom unit rather nicely sits in with the PC engine next to it so ideally my goal at the end of this is to have the PC engine the cd-rom and everything working through this unit but we'll see how far we get we'll just start with the PC engine today over in the Box we've got the innards of that second PC engine which was empty and it's made up of the system board and we'll get more familiar with that throughout the series and the hugh card reader and these should be connected together but what i found was as soon as i opened this up and moved the cable they just tore away the ribbon cable just tore away there is no sign of leaking capacitors there which may have degraded the cable I think it's just aged this old cables got stiff it's got brittle and as soon as I moved it it tore away in fact there be two cables there'll be another one there it is the more I moved it more came away so I just took it off completely and will clear those holes with this with the desoldering gun and replace the cable it's still connected here let's just see how brittle it is I'm just going to bend the cable here I'll apply minimal pressure and we'll just see if it does the same as it did to me at the other ends now see that seems okay there but it is a warning to you if you open up your PC engine just be very careful of these cables because in my case all except for this bit came away really easily and I wish I had that on camera but I don't so we'll carefully de-solder that and replace the cable with some new cable we've got the top of the cd-rom unit there or the interface unit sorry there's that cable we've got one controller and everything is a little bit yellowed here in there so there is the potential to retro right the pc engine but that's always the last thing we need to think about first of all we need to make sure what's actually working that I have port in anticipation of doing this a replacement power supply so make sure you've got the right power supply on the right polarity if we're to use the CD ROM unit we need the hugh card for it which we have got here again Thank You Chrissy that's in there so that's good to have there's a couple more hugh cards in here we've got well they're both both in Japanese that one I've got no clue all that is I did buy chase HQ a while back but that's gone missing so hopefully I can find that because that's a fun game we've got various parts from where I've disassembled the other one I have bought really camping kits in advance so we may well go ahead and recap these units and I've got the dust cover for the expansion bus which is nice it's nice to be able to fill that hole if we're not using the cd-rom system I imagine they get lost quite a lot and this looks like some kind of controller converter not quite sure where that's for all all of these things we'll figure out before the end of the series don't worry I will answer these questions I'm just giving you my first impressions and then there's shielding which has got stuck to a bit of tape with the switch and the various screws which I took out when I took it apart to make sure I did lose them so that's what we're working with today it really is a big old box of pc-engine trash and it's gonna be a journey of discovery today I think because I've not worked on the system before I've got a few ideas on how we can perhaps improve it if we can get it working so let's take it all over to the lab let's learn all about it at the end of it let's hopefully have some pc-engine treasure to enjoy here it is on the workbench then to take a look at it's such a nice compact machine and way better looking in my opinion and the turbo graphics that officially appeared here in the UK and the US and takes the little white PC engine any day of the week you can immediately see that it's a really compact board we've got three Hudson branded ICS in the middle of the board two chips make up the GPU or graphics processing unit and they are the hu six to seven oh that's a video display controller or VDC which has 64 K of video RAM to work with then we've got the H 260 260 which is the video color encoder or VCE and they're complemented by the HU sixty to eighty which is the CPU it's a derivative of the popular MOS technology 6502 CPU the same CPU that we found in the Commodore 64 but this one has some added bells and whistles which allows it to run at two speeds it can run at 1.79 megahertz or a blistering 7.16 megahertz you put that in the context of the commodore 64 and this thing absolutely flies baked into that chip is also a six channel sound generator so all of your video processing and sound needs are covered with this cluster of chips it's really neat this is all complemented by 8k of working ramped down at the bottom of the board here which isn't a great deal but the games which came on Huw cards ridged sizes of 20 megabits or 2.5 megabytes in size so the machine was able to tie all of this together to great effect and hopefully we'll get to see that beta so where do we start on fixing this well power is always a good idea so tucked down here is a good old 7805 voltage regulator which is why we've got such a big heat sink in place these get really toasty and the heat needs to be dissipated the 7805 job is to take online volt DC input and give us a 5 volt DC output it's a simple task to measure this and make sure it's working with your multimeter leg one is the input two is the ground and three is the output so you can measure this carefully either on top of the board or underneath whichever suits you better to see if we get in those readings or anything close to those readings just be careful not to short out the legs while you're measuring this and I can quickly see that yes we do have a power problem here there's barely anything registering at all on the input and well nothing on the output whatsoever so how does this compare to our second working PC engine well we'll need to open it up and this is done by removing the security screw so if you haven't got a security screwdriver it might be worth getting yourself one these screws are used in a variety of consoles Sub Sega Nintendo PC engine all sorts of consoles so it's worth having this in your toolkit you can get the screws undone with a pair of pliers in a pinch but you do risk damaging the case so for a couple of quid treat yourself on checking the regulator in this one we've got eight point two volts on the input close enough and five volts on the output so this regulator is fine and that's exactly how we'd want it to behave back then to our broken console I continue to check in the voltage from the power input and then something a bit more obvious came to light when I took the heatsink off which keeps the regulator cool hidden away under there is a one amp fuse and well it looks a little milky on the outside so let's zoom in and enhance that please and yes you can see our fuse is quite obviously blown of course we need to replace that fuse but I'm going to also replace the voltage regulator with something that might help with the longevity of the system what I'm going to replace this with is not another 7805 but instead it's this a little package here this is an Okie branded switching regulator the part number is in the video description and it does exactly the same job as the 7805 it's a drop-in replacement but it does it in a much more efficient manner and the result of this is much much less heat to the point where we don't even need the heatsink anymore and it will be far far kinder to the surrounding electrolytic capacitors there no friend of heat and they can quickly dry out when they're so close to a heat source as the 7805 so this is a win/win however you look at it so I quickly installed the switching voltage regulator and before I go to the shop to buy myself some fuses I thought I'll just pinch the fuse out of the other PC engine which was intact for testing and I very lazily slacked it in quickly using the desoldering gun yes sometimes I cut corners too in all honestly I found that my usual chisel tip on the iron was a little ineffective and I didn't want to wait for it to go down to change the tip so please take this opportunity to roast me in the comment section a little later you'll see a larger tip on my soldering iron and that really did get the job done [Music] so if we perform a test this time we've got nine volts going in and we've got around five volts coming out of our new switching regulator without that big old chunky heatsink lovely stuff so now that I know we've got our five volts going into the board let's swap that fuse out again there that belongs in the other pc-engine because the luxury of not having the heatsink in place now is that we have the clearance to install a fuse holder so that makes swapping the fuse out in future even easier so I did that and then I popped in a one amp fuse and it wasn't quite flush with the PCB the legs on the fuse holder get wider towards the top and annoyingly there's just a tiny amount of wobble but I'm confident that is in there and it's not going to cause any problems it just needed a little bit of hot glue to give it a bed to sit on so that it doesn't wobble and then it's fine I'm sure with a little bit of shopping around you can find a more suitable fuse holder than I had in stock here so I feel like we're on a roll now so let's continue this this isn't strictly necessary but as the board is currently detached from the Hugh card reader I thought I'd just take the opportunity to recap it it's far easier done with all of that ribbon cable out of the way and as I said the capacitors especially that we're near the 7805 will probably be thankful for being replaced so let's swap out all of those electrolytic caps and give the boarder clean under them as we go [Music] with all of those capacitors replaced it was then time to figure out what to do with the cable to the U card reader whatever we're going to do I need to clear the holes of the bits of cable that were in there where the cable ripped away and this was mostly achieved by adding fresh solder to the holes and then using the d soldering gun to get it all molten mixing it in with the debris and then sucking it out the disordering gun is great but a job like this can quickly block it in if you try to push on with the job when it's not working efficiently well you can quickly start damaging things so keep your d soldering gun clean have some spare tips to hand and you'll be fine for some of the more stubborn bits of debris that wouldn't come out with the gun i gently heated them and then slid them out with tweezers but you can't be careful make sure that the debris is moving freely before you actually pull them otherwise you can easily pull the eyelet out of the hole if you pull too hard and then you've lost your connection to the trace and it all gets terribly messy so we want to avoid that if we can just make sure everything's moving don't force anything and then with all of the holes cleared we can give it a really good clean up with some IPA so how should we reconnect our Hue hard reader the space between each hole or the pitch as it's known is a standard two point five four millimeters so we could easily find something but I quite like the idea of putting our header in so that we can detach the two halves of the PC engine if we want to it might be a tight squeeze given how small the cases but let's give it a go and see what happens you'll also notice that the two rows of holes are not completely in line they're slightly offset so it's not a case of just dropping in say an IDE header you need to have two rows of separate headers and when I try to put mine in even though they're advertised as having a picture of 2.5 four millimeters they must be Japanese millimeters or something because they don't quite fit it's just a tiny bit out to the point where if you put an entire row in it kind of bends in the middle and that's not good we don't want that stress constantly being on a connector so I split the header into smaller chunks and just shaved a little bit off the edge to bring it back into line there we go that makes sure all of the pins are even and none of them are sitting too proudly [Music] [Music] with those soldered into place and everything cleaned up everything is ready there we've recapped we've got that nice voltage regulator in there we've got a new fuse we've got our header pins we just need to connect the huge art reader now as lovely as it would be to have header pins at this end so we can detach the cable at either end there just isn't the room for it in the PC engines case this is really tight squeeze where the hew card reader goes in so I have to solder the cable directly into the PCB trying to get the plastic sheath of the cables nice and flush to the board so that we avoid any stray or fray cables shorting out the hole next to it we want to keep everything really really neat so take your time over this and it's tricky because tinning the wires before putting them through these little holes can actually make them too big to push through so I opted to twist them solder them when they're through the hole trim them and just work out a system that keeps them as neat as possible the cables I'm using are dupont jumper cables and they're readily available in lots of shops and then the sort that you might use for an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi project and I've chosen them because I really wasn't in the mood for crimping the over-40 cable ends DuPont wires are already terminated and then you just slide them into a plastic block like so I don't think you can get a block that's 11 wires wide which is what you need for each row so I've done the best I can by splitting them up and I kind of like the rainbow of colors it feels a bit more fitting for the pc engine than the original dull gray cable now with that done I can't possibly put it all back in a dirty case so I took the chance to give everything a really good scrub for both of the PC engines in fact a brush is essential for this job to get all those vents nooks and crannies cleaned and yes baking powder for fluffy muffins came up just to give it enough of an abrasive edge to work on and get those really stubborn scuffs and marks off of the plastics that incidentally is the original tub of baking powder that I had when I started the channel in 2016 is its way out of date you don't want to be making any muffins with that but it's still perfect for cleaning and then we can put everything back in the case now this is a bit fiddly with what I've done because the drawback of the cable we've got compared to a flat cable is that it will bunch up it won't instantly lay flat so it takes a bit of poking around to get everything to line up but hopefully in time it will form a bit of a memory of where it will lay and it will be easier if you need to open and close it there's doesn't feel like there's any stress on the case when I screw it together there's no bulges as if everything's pushing onto the header pins or anything like that it's a close fit but it is a fit so we've got away with this and I'm really happy with that result so now we can test it does our pc engine live let's find out does it work indeed and before I press that on button I must apologize if you've spotted any continuity issues the lights in the cave here were condemned a couple of weeks ago and it's taken over two and a half weeks for the landlord to actually get it sorted so I've been filming sporadically with temporary lights just trying to do what I can to get this episode together and I'm glad what we've got to this point but if you need any explanation as to the multiple wardrobe changes throughout that's why anyway let's see if this PC engine works will flick it on now you know it really helped if I plugged it in a via television you saw nothing and didn't happen okay does this PC engine work let's turn it on and find out apparently not right no another cable works if you plug the power in and if you plug it into the television but it works it actually works this is brilliant let's just turn the volume up and make sure we've got some audio here and we've got audio now a symptom that you often get with these is just a plain white screen which means it can actually read the hew card it's not a big problem if you've got a white screen as I found with the second PC engine that we had in the box here's a clip of me testing it we saw earlier that the voltage regulator in it was fine and all I got was the white screen when I turned it on so I gave the hew card he clean with some IPA and then I put that in and out of the hew card slot multiple times to clean up the contacts in the hew card slot and then it worked perfectly so that PC engine wasn't broken it just had dirty contacts so that's why we haven't really seen much of that second PC engine in the episode it's been all about this one and it's working great now where do we go from here obviously we've got the CD ROM this is actually called it's got C ROM and then a little - there as if it's cd-rom squared you actually pronounce this CD ROM ROM which I love so well we've got the CD ROM ROM to try and get working because I've got a distinct lack of game so if we can get this working and get a load of copied games downloaded and burned and that really opens up the library for me you saw as I was testing the second pc engine there that the interface unit works just fine but it does present us with a little bit of a problem the pc engine itself only has a TV modulator as a video output and yes you can RGB mod it but if we're gonna use the interface unit so that we can use the CD ROM ROM this only has a composite out so I'm wondering if we can maybe modify the interface unit so that we can get our GP out to get the best possible picture but what I've been using in the meantime is this cable which I managed to pick up on eBay because the expansion slot on the back gives you every possible output that you could possibly want from the PC engine including the RGB output so if somebody on eBay has made a cable I'll put a link in the description which why is in and it goes straight through to a scart cable at the other end and gives us our RGB output to give us a really nice output without having to actually modify the console at all so that's really nice I can't plug that into the interface unit so as a standalone PC engine with this cable brilliant we've got lots more work to do I'm certainly not going to be using the RF modulator that's for sure anyway I'm really pleased with how things look today the pc engines came up really white as well I don't think we actually need to retro bright if I'm honest with you guys and that's good at this time of year in the UK there's barely any Sun out there to help us I have had some problems with the controller if the wire gets bent it stopped working so we'll need to take that apart and have a look at that and of course the cd-rom drive so that's what we're doing episode 2 in the meantime thank you for watching I'd love to hear your recommendations on games that I should try especially if they have an English language option because I haven't got a clue what I'm doing a lot of these games so where I'd appreciate your suggestions and as always thank you for watching and take care everyone if you enjoy my content and would like to support the cave while receiving a completely ad free experience and access to releases one week before they go public then visit patreon.com forward slash retro man cave and join the official cave dwellers thank you for your support [Music] [Music]

Channel: RMC - The Cave

Views: 76,067

Rating: 4.9651599 out of 5

Keywords: computer history, nostalgia, retro, retro computer, retro man cave, pc engine, pc engine repair, pc enging restoration, computer restoration, retro repair, console repair, tear down, regulator, white screen, pc engine problems, fixing, sega, nintendo, nec

Id: 0VxAmCYXp_0

Length: 22min 45sec (1365 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2020