3DO goes blank or loop resets after about 10 minutes of gameplay

Hi there,

I bought that 3DO system (FZ-1) about a year ago but barely played with it. I wanted to do some tests last week with my new XRGB-Mini, so my plans were to use it for about an hour, but it didn't last that long. After 10 minutes, it went blank, meaning black screen and no sound, only the red light was on and I couldn't eject the disc. I let the system cooldown for a few minutes and I was able to use it just enough to eject the disc. I tried another game the next day, after about more or less 10 minutes, the system went back to the 3DO welcome screen and kept looping back to that until it went blank again.

Yesterday, I opened the machine to take a look at the caps cause I've seen on a YouTube video that this might be the problem. The board was very clean and the only thing I could see that was problematic could big one of the bigger caps that has some green residue at the bottom, this is either flux or cap leakage. I tried playing it again by leaving the top open, it lasted about twice as long before giving the same problem. This could be a coincidence or overheating issues.

What do you guys think?

Thanks

 

I haven't actually looked under the hood of a FZ-1, but are there any heat sinks or anything that could not be properly attached? Any fans? Also, that cap is likely flux, but it wouldn't hurt to replace it and clean up the board some.

 

There are no fans or heatsinks (except PSU transistors of course) - it's 12.5MHz ARM CPU after all and rest of the chips don't run at 100GHz either. But yeah, replacing caps isn't a bad idea. I remember GoldStar GDO-203P that was completely dead, nothing except power LED, when i replaced all those caps it works like a charm.

 

I was thinking more along the lines of a heat sink attached to a voltage regulator. Older systems with 78xx regulators tended to run hot. But yeah, I'd start with a recap if that's a documented issue.

 

Thanks for the replies guys. I don't have any soldering skills, so I wanted to make sure because I'll need to pay someone to do that.

 

Its most likely the cap, its obviously going bad from the leakage. Also others may be going bad from age. Just because you dont see any bulging or corrosion doesn't indicate a cap is bad or good. If the system is resetting its almost always bad caps.