Revealing my collection of AES games is taking some time–not because I couldn’t read the Japanese printed on the spine, but because within an hour I had destroyed my AES console. Let me explain. Way back before I made the last post, I unboxed the system, tested it out and decided to install a UniBIOS to set the system language to English. With (most) MVS systems this is a painless process. You pry out the old BIOS and pop in the new one. Because the AES is a consumer console, SNK decided customers didn’t need a socketable BIOS to service their system and so the original BIOS is soldered in, very finely.
I had already ordered a 40-pin IC socket, so all that was to do was desolder the original BIOS, solder in a socket, and pop in the UniBIOS like with my MVS. I never considered myself bad at soldering until that day.
New BIOS socket, installed…?
My error was in my tool selection. When I started soldering many years ago, I didn’t know jack, and I learned through trial and error. I decided that this should be a very clean desoldering job and used lots of flux. Which was plumbing flux, because years ago the guy at Home Depot told me that would be suitable for electronics. Turns out plumbing flux is highly corrosive and should never be used on PCBs as it eats through traces. Now I’m starting to understand why I had so many monitor repair troubles with the arcade cabs.
Here’s what my AES did after the mod:
And with a cart:
After many hours of running bodge wires, checking against pinout schematics, and begging for help on forums, I gave in. I got in touch with three hobbyist repairmen on classifieds, and two soldering shops, but after showing them photos of the board they all declared they couldn’t fix it. I had one last resort. neo-geo.com.
It was lurking on the Neo forums in my middle school computer lab in 2007 that I learned people could collect an entire arcade cabinet. The Neo Geo forums are an old, harsh place. But after introducing myself in some previous posts and explaining my situation, I got in touch with a member on the East Coast who fixed it for half the price I’ve seen people charge for just installing the BIOS socket in a working system. What a hero. Here’s what it came back like:
So yeah, plumbing flux is powerful stuff! And now my system works. I’ll finally talk about these AES games in the next post, or maybe the next, next post.