Death and Old Consoles

ghosty2a

Hey Death, seen you post several times you fix old game consoles, and was wondering If you ever work on the old Mattel Intellivision ones? Got on old one sitting around in our attic, in peices. It died years ago, well decades acctualy, with some sort of power supply problem. Would get hot, then start resetting, which was real annoying when trying to play games. And being an old electronics tech, try to see if i could fix it, thus the reason why it is in peices. But with out any tools, meters or O-scope, never could figure it out. As an interesting side note, one of the carts I have is the DnD game for it. Realy whis WOTWC would release the rights to that so we could retro play it on an emulater. That game was actualy my first foray into the world of DnD, got some good memeries of playing that game, hmm some 30 plus years ago. Never will forget the first time I ran across the Dragon in that game, the final "Boss" in it. Had run out of torches, and was running around on a black screen, trying to get back out of the dungion, when i suddenly found my self being attacked, and I about jumped outa my seat due to sound it made. All i could see on the screen were the words The Dragon attacks you. It didnt take the Draggy long to finish his "snack". The next few meetings did not fair any better, even with torches to see him with, as the arrows and regulat swords did no harm to him. Eventualy I figured out there was a special sword you had to find that would do him damage. any way let me know if you are interested in having a look at it. Might also add I have the keyboard attachment as well, which enabeled you to make your own mods. Also have the voice box accessory as well.

deathssickle

Umm... Its harder if I cant look at the electronic personally but I will try to scrape up some knowledge on it.(Currently my Pastor wants me to fix his 5 cd changing radio, unfortunately the type he has goes out a lot do to power issues, it is always in sleep mode or on, so power always flows through it when plugged in. So if you have a power problem while using the Radio a part or 2 will blow.)

But yah I can try to see if I can get you some info on fixing it, It sounds like either a heat-sink problem or a problem with a specific part(cant remember the name) that is used to filter power. Ive never worked on Mattel, but I usually can fix things even if I havent fixed one before. I can say this CD based consoles are much harder to fix than a cartridge base, it is true about the saying of the more complex a machine, and the more moving parts, the easier it is to break down and the more problems that can occur.

deathssickle

Have you checked the ribbon cable that runs from the power area of the board to the Logic Circuit, Also inspect for bad trace elements. Tell me if you find anything and we can go from there.