deepthaw

Thanks for the offer but I printed off the portion of the service manual that lists what components are which and handed it to the guy at the electronics shop so I'll assume I got what I needed.

C44 & C43, I believe. One is in the back near you'd want to install the power jack, and the other is right by where you'd do all the work to run the new cables. I actually have a local electronics shop so I may be able to get them locally.

Those poor ghosts.

I seem to recall Next Generation magazine being very anti-Nintendo - not out of a sense of malice I think, but more a sense that they represented the past while Sony was the future. Next Generation seemed to be editorially tilted towards being "adult" and "serious" so Nintendo caught their ire quite often. I *did* end up selling my N64 after finishing Ocarina of Time but held onto my PS1 for many years, largely due to the vast number of JRPGs that were coming out on it. Back in the 90s, there were a vast number of fanboys who went where the JPRGs were (myself included.) It's why I played SNES over Genesis, and why I jumped ship to Sony with Final Fantasy VII. Then I stuck with Sony and Sega because their systems were getting the Capcom arcade ports (Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, the VS series, etc.) I think Nintendo underestimated how much that loss would hurt them.

If I could find a usenet archive that still worked, I could be extremely specific. Me and my friends were pretty active on usenet back then and remember plenty of flamewars, conspiracy theories, and general shenanigans that were going on.

I don't recall exactly which caps they are, but I may need to replace one of the big green capacitors on the 5200 board (one of which is near where you'd do work for the power mod.) What type of capacitor are they? I can get the values for the specific caps from the service manual, but they don't look like either the electrolytic or ceramic capacitors I'm vaguely familiar with. Can anybody give me some tips on what I'd need to order to replace them?

1995 was my prime computing and gaming nerd time. I'd gotten my first computer a few years prior, and was heavily into BBSes, etc. I was still living with my parents and was able to devote 100% of my time to hobbies and general goofing off. Was a good year.

Well, I *think* I still had an SNES. When Doom hit in 93/94 and I got into PC gaming, I lost all interest in console games. Wasn't really until the PlayStation came out that I got back in. (Wow, was that only a year? Felt like forever back then...)

1995 would have been... I probably still had an SNES, and I picked up a PlayStation 1 on release day. PC wise, I was probably still on my 486DX4/75 playing the hell out of Doom and later that year, Warcraft II.

Whoa, you better get a hazmat suit to keep yourself safe from that tower of power you got going there. You should be safe from blast-processing radiation until you plug in & Knuckles.

The problem with letting his Pac-Man scores stand is that it shows that so long as you don't get caught, cheating is fine. That'd almost encourage more cheating because people would know only those attempts for which they were caught would get tossed.

Yes. But I decided to redo the wiring because it looked awful (especially the diode) and figured I already had it open.

I think the market killed games themselves. If countless iterations of Call of Duty and Madden didn't sell millions of copies, publishers would branch out. I've taken a liking to Indie gaming to get my creativity fix. Smaller budgets, more experimentation.

That's what I meant - "next time you throw a tantrum just give it to me instead." I've only thrown two game systems in the trash out of sheer frustration with myself breaking them trying to mod them... So far. I'm extremely easygoing with other people but hate myself when I mess things up. Not a good thing.

I'll add that to my shopping list. By the time I'm done this "free" 5200 will have nickel and dime me to death.

, Only been here like two weeks and I have a reputation.

Is that ic likely something incompetent soldering for the power mod would damage?

I may try that. I originally chucked it in the trash because I was so frustrated with myself, but I dig it back out. It was working fine, but I had to desolder and resolder wires so the new power jack could be screwed into the case. That's when it all went wrong.

I think I damaged the motherboard with repeated clumsy soldering and D soldering to fix the fact that I really didnt know what I was doing when I first wired it up. I tried doing some continuity testing and it seems to be fine, I thought maybe I broke the capacitor you install but I replaced it and it still doesnt work. I put enough time in it that I have decided to cut my losses and it would probably be more efficient to just order or try to track down another system rather than try and get this one working. I will call it a surprisingly inexpensive learning opportunity, since the system was given to me for free. I now have the dubious distinction of owning three working 5200 controllers, and no system to go with it.

Lets just say if I was a surgeon Id be facing malpractice charges.

And I somehow made my 5200 stop powering up when I had to desolder and resolver the cables to install the jack properly. Spent three hours trying to fix it and nada. Oh well.

Yep. Runs to one of those couplers and straight to the antenna/cable jack on my old CRT.

I didn't remove mine (like you, I didn't see a reference to removing it) and it seems to be working fine.

They'll send out an errata sheet which consists of nothing but stickers with asterisks on them.

Huh, I didn't, and it still works. Granted, I haven't closed the case up yet or played it for an extended period of time. Why does the 5200 have two connectors for AV, with one apparently unused?