Retrogaming : Game Gear Repair

So,

I started a new hobby, repairing and modding retro consoles. What are retro consoles you ask? Any console that’s no longer being produced by the manufacturer. This includes things like the PlayStation and Xbox, but also the way older stuff like a Sega MegaDrive, Game Gear, Nintendo Entertainment System and the likes.

I currently own various of these consoles myself, and they all still work. However, because I like tinkering with things, I purchase faulty consoles from Ebay, repair them and then try to sell them for a small fee to recover the costs of the used components and earn a little bit of money on the side.

Last week I got 2 Game Gear systems from Ebay. Both being sold as “defect” because the screens were very dark, and the sound was not working on either system. I made a rash decision and ordered 2 sound board, but in the end it turned out I didn’t had to do this…..

Problem 1 : No sound

The most common problem with Game Gear consoles is either no sound, or no display. Does this mean the console is a loss? Not at all. The cause here is bad capacitors. During the 90′s, when these consoles were produced, there was a bad batch of capacitors going around in the market. Sega unfortunatly used these in the production of the Game Gear.

The result? They start leaking and become useless. In the case of this Game Gear, it was so bad that several of the pads where they are connected on, had corrosion on them, making it really hard to replace them, as you cannot solder anything to a corroded pad. Here’s a picture of the pad after removing the bad capacitors from the sound board:

Soundboard

The lighting on the picture ain’t that good, sorry for that, but the pads on this board were a complete disaster. After spending about 2 hours on the soundboard alone, I managed to clean the corrosion of the pads. Because I like to keep things as they originally were, I replaced the caps with the same type:

Same Soundboard with new Capacitors

As you can see, the board looks spiffy clean now and has the same type of capacitors you’d find in any Game Gear Soundboard. After testing the board, the sound quality was superb and the first problem solved.

Problem 2 : No Display

The second problem in reparing the console, was the lack of a display. You could vaguely see the game when looking at an angle, but overall the screen looked really dark.

Game Gears have this contrast scroll wheel on the side to increase or decrease the contrast based on the environment you’re playing in. Even turning this one all the way up kept the screen really dark. Again, the cause of the problem here is the same as with the soundboard: Bad Capacitors.

Fortunatly for me, none of them leaked soo much that the pads became useless or corroded. It still took quite a bit of time to replace every single capacitor on the board, but the end result is definitly worth it:

Sonic dashing across the screen

So now I have a fully repaired Game Gear. The only downside is that the display is not in 100% condition. If you look at the left side of the screen, you’ll see a darker band across the display. It’s not always there, and it doesn’t really affect game play, but it shows that this display has been through alot. Unfortunatly, this is not something I can repair.

Hope this was an interesting article, and I will post a new article soon where I will address the repairs of the second Game Gear as well as my Sega Saturn and Sega DreamCast.

PlayStation3, Sony and their service :: part 3

Okay,

good news in regards to this whole story. I missed a tweet yesterday from Sony Deutschland where they asked me to send an email to a specific address. They made a small typo so it took me a while to discover it, since it did not show up in my tweet application.

Basically they asked me to send an email so they can bring me in touch with the right person for my problem. So credit where credit is due. They have responded to my complaints. Took a while, but at least the story is progressing, so I’m a bit more happy again now. Whether this will lead to something or not will have to be seen. At least I’m not being ignored and left standing. Progress is slow, but there is progress at least.

For now I’m stuck to playing either on my Xbox or my Computer. I still have my PlayStation 2, but let’s face it, nothing beats a good round of WipeOut, Final Fantasy 13 or Gran Turismo. Heck, even Metal Gear Solid deserves to be in that list.

So stay tuned for further updates regarding this story. My faith and respect for Sony have dropped at the moment, but they can still redeem themselves, on how they handle the case. I mean “shit happens” right?

Playstation3, Sony and their service :: Part 2

Okay,

The story still continues really. In case you have not been following what I’m talking about, I refer to my post : http://arnedeherdt.wordpress.com/2012/09/22/playstation3-sony-and-their-service/

So far, I have made several tweets about this, and I’ve been advised by Sony Customer Support Deutschland to send a letter directly to marketing here in Germany. I sent this letter about a week ago, and still no response has been made by Sony on their end.

Today I made another twitter post and received a reply from SonySupportUSA. It’s funny that I get response from the US departments, but none whatsoever from the local Europe branches. I’ll give credit that the time I made the tweets is outside office hours, but still, a whole week nothing and suddenly the US front responds.

I will not complain about that, at least someone is starting to listen now. I hope that with more noise and poking the right people I will finally receive my compensation for this lousy service. I’m not in it for the money, I just want to play on my PlayStation again, and be treated like a real customer, not a source of money.

Playstation3, Sony and their service

Alright,
been quite some time since I wrote on my blog, and honestly I wish my new post was something more happy then this.
About a month ago, my PlayStation3 suddenly decided to quit working. The thing is pretty old, since it was one of the first models to be released. So I can understand that it runs into defects at some point due the complex technology being used, although I don’t fully accept it. For reference, I have the 60GB Model that had backwards compatibility through software emulation.

So, after alot of emails, phonecalls and twitter messages with the customer support in Germany, I managed to get the model repaired/replaced. In the end it was replaced by another 60 GB model, because I rely on the backwards compatibility of the device to play some of my PlayStation2 games. This cost me 125€ to get the “repairs” done as Sony called it. I still don’t like it, but at least I got my system working again.

Now today, on September 22nd 2012, the system decided to quit again. No screen output and a blinking red light. So far I managed to reboot the system and got the disk out. It’s cooling down now, but honestly, this is not acceptable. The device has been used twice since I got it back and it’s already running into trouble. I’ve currently sent an email to Sony and some twitter messages. I hope they respond damm fast to this email because I’m really not pleased.

And to pick up on the previous points about why I don’t accept that this already breaks down after a few years: I have still an Old Sega MegaDrive connected to my television. This device is about 21 years old, and it still works. It never broke down, it never glitched or acted weird. For all these years this device has been working without any real issues.
Those who don’t know what I’m talking about:

So Sony: Get your act together, and at least show some descency in getting this broken PlayStation repaired free of charge, or replace it with a new one, because honestly this is really poor customer support.

swTOR : Failure of the year

The title says it all really. I’ve been playing the game since the beta phases and I enjoyed the game despite the flaws it has. I have this nice guild of friends and co-workers that I play with, but what has happened today is simply not acceptable.

Patch 1.2 was released last week for the game. Prior to that there were bugs now and then. One of the bugs that I had was that the display went out of range if I pressed alt+tab. Hitting alt+enter quickly solved this problem again. It was annoying but nothing game breaking. This changed today with the update to the game:

I patched the game and went ingame. I hit the alt+tab button because I needed to look something up, and I wasn’t experiencing the above problem for some time. Suddenly I got the “out of range” display issue again. Remembering what I did previously, I hit the alt+enter combination to switch back to windowed mode. Suddenly my entire screen goes black and the “out of range” message appears.

WTF IS THIS SHIT is going through my mind.

I hit the reset button, in the hope that the problem dissapears. Windows is rebooting, and when the login screen is about to appear :  BAM, again the out of range.

Now I’m getting ticked off. I uninstall the NVidia drivers to switch back to native windows display settings. This seems to work, so I reinstall the nvidia drivers again, immediatly updating to a later version. Rebooting windows –> Same shit happens. The only things that seemed to work are system restore and safe mode. Even forcing Windows to reboot into low resolution VGA mode did not solve the problem. It would get up to the login screen, but as soon as you login again your display would go out of range.

I have a high tolerance for games that contains bugs, crash now and then or are not properly finished. But this is simply not acceptable. And when I look at the customer support forums of Nioware, I’m not the only one with this problem.

Bioware, you lost a customer today for swTOR.

A new carreer, a new life

So,

i’ve moved to Münich, renting an appartment and trying to settle in for my job at ProSieben Games. Is it easy? No, definitly not. I won’t hide it under a bench that I have home sickness. It’s simply not that easy to leave everything behind and basically start over in another country.

I’ve done it before, moving to Germany that is, and despite the troubles it brings, it also has alot of advantages. In the first place, I’ve been able to meet alot of new people. Most of them are colleagues at work, but nonetheless they’re good friends that help me out whenever I run into an issue. Secondly, i’m able to learn a new language. I can’t point out enough how valuable it is to know other languages. I don’t speak German that fluently, nor can I write it properly, but I’m able to help myself and I’m learning new things day by day. In most shops and situations people adjust quickly to the fact that I don’t understand everything. In some cases they switch to English to explain something or use different words to describe something.

On financial level this move was a complete disaster. I’m not saying it’s not worth it, but it required a huge investment from my side that I now slowly need to start paying back to the people that helped me out. It will probably take a while, but I’m sure that I can get it round within the comming year. This largely depends on the amount of taxes I’ll be paying here and whether or not someone will rent out my appartment in Belgium.

Would I recommend something like this? Yes, definitly. The experience alone is worthwile doing. Not to mention that it looks grand on your resumé that you’ve worked abroad for companies. Germany’s culture is different than mine. Some things they consider normal are weird for me and the other way around. Same applies to humor and conversations. Depending on who you’re talking with some words are a no-go..

I hope to write more about this later on when I’ve managed to acquire a camera and take pictures of the stuff I’m doing here, but for now this small piece of text will do.

Refurbishing my appartment

As some of you already knew, I bought an appartment in June 2011. The place was a bit rundown after standing there and required some work to get it acceptable again to live in. Currently we’re placing the finishing touches in all the rooms such as painting the ceiling, adding paper to the walls, cleaning (god, I hate cleaning…) and filling gaps here and there.

The original place was created/build in the seventies, and from the stories I heard, the original owners never did anything in the place. This was obvious when you looked at the place. Especially the original kitchen was a mess. Not that it was dirty or destroyed, it just showed that this was the original kitchen and that nothing was done about it before.

The kitchen as it used to be

The kitchen as it is now

The kitchen unfortunatly turned out to be a little more exspensive than planned, about 1000€ above the planned budget unfortunatly… However we’ll manage. The pictures below show the changed bedrooms with the new floor and paper against the wall. Each section will have a before-after picture

Large Bedroom

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Small Bedroom

Hallway

There’s still some work left, but we’re getting to it

 

F.A.C.T.S 2011

This saturday I went to the F.A.C.T.S 2011 convention in Ghent, Belgium.

This is the second time that I’ve attended the convention, and I still don’t regret ever going there. For those who don’t know F.A.C.T.S, it’s one of the biggest conventions in the benelux in regards to Sci-Fi, Anime and Manga. It covers all topics from cosplay as your favourite game character to assets from Star Wars and Star Trek such as people running around with R2D2 robots or trekkies meeting up.

I personally go to the convention because I’m into Anime and Star Wars. This year I joined the cosplay again as Sandshrew the pokémon. Partially due lack of time to come up with a new costume, partially because I still enjoy the older pokémon merchandise. The convention itself started at 09.00 for the early bird access, but I went at 10.00 together with my friend.

At the entrance of the convention, there’s the usual assets from Star Wars and the Nazgul from Lord of the Rings. I tried to take a picture from the center guy, but due the crowd and hurry it became a bit blurry, still it’s a decent shot and reveals most of the details on the outfit of the guy:

Ofcourse there’s various other people that are dressed at the convention. Below are the pictures I took from the outfits I thought looked pretty cool. Again, I apologise if some of these pictures are a bit blurry, but due the crowd that usually surrounded us, they had to be taken fast:

Ofcourse a cosplay convention wouldn’t be complete without some actual role-playing going on. Since I was dressed up as a pokémon, it was only a matter of time untill I’d run into a “professor Oak” or another pokémon/pokémon trainer that would bring up some weird scenes. I don’t have pictures of all of it, but the picture below is about the “encounter with the professor”. Which immediatly drew alot of attention from the people standing around us:

All the other pictures not displayed in the blog can be found in the media gallery of the site or on my facebook profile. If anyone wants to receive the original picture or have it taken down from the site, feel free to leave a note or contact me.

Facebook album

And I hope to see YOU on F.A.C.T.S 2012 !

New blog

So,

After running into various problem with blogspot in regards to putting source code snippets online, I’ve given up on getting it to work properly. Blogspot is nice, don’t get me wrong on this, but it’s just too limited for the things I want to place online. I can simply copy & paste the source code, but that removes all the formatting and makes it hard to read.

With wordpress, I’m hoping to have found a better platform for posting my findings on coding and configuration of the systems that I work with. I also hope to profit from the flixibility of WordPress and slowly move all my projects to this new site.

Given the upcoming changes for the OData protocol, I’ll be posting something new soon in regards to the toolkit I’ve been working on latelty that allows for easy & fast creation of OData Services using the C# WCF Data Services.