Mega-CD problems

Hello, all. My name is Victor Golf Charles. I'm a 22-year-old retro gamer, and I like to import Japanese video games.

My favourite system (yes, I'm an American typing British vocabulary... that's cos I've been immersing myself into WAY too much British media... SO SUE ME!) has to be the Mega Drive/Genesis, released by Sega. Presently, my setup is...
- Sega HAA-2510 Mega Drive (the earlier version, not the inferior circa-1990 version)
- two Sega SJ-6600 Arcade Power Stick 6B
- Sega HAA-2951 Mega Modem
- Sega HAA-2910 Mega-CD

I've landed here because I want to share with you a couple of problems I've been having with my HAA-2910 Mega-CD.
- First off, my Mega-CD's RCA jacks are putting out sound that is rapidly cutting in and out and in and out and in and out and so on and so forth. This sound is also put through to the Mega Drive's monaural signal and headphones jack (but the problem is not present if I connect the Mega Drive's headphones jack to the Mega-CD's mixing port with the Mixing Cable and have my sound put out through the Mega Drive's monaural signal instead; however, I won't be able to hear PCM or CD audio, just the FM and PSG sounds).
- The CD-ROM drive is being picky about which games it wants to play and which games it doesn't want to play. It plays Sol-Feace just fine, but it takes a bit of nudging to get it to play Sonic the Hedgehog CD, and it's largely a game of chance when it comes to getting it to run Dragon's Lair.

The Mega-CD worked just fine the first couple of minutes from the moment I took it out of the gift box one of my friends sent me and hooked it up in accordance with the manual. Then it begun having a tizzy. A particular RetroJunkie2020 told me that these problems may be due to 1.) bad capacitors on the Sub Board in the Mega-CD and 2.) the Sony KSS-240A pickup in the drive needing some adjustments.

The following video should demonstrate these particular problems: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPOvgtlf7ao (pardon me for my slow speech, cos it was filmed on the spot late at night)

Any solutions? Just let me know.



--Victor Golf Charles

 

Replace the caps, then assess if you still have issues before moving to the pickup.

MegaCD's commonly have bad caps that cause all sorts of issues.

 

Figured it might be bad caps. However, since I don't have a soldering iron of my own, I'm gonna have to take it to work sometime soon and see if my boss can swap the bad caps on the Sub Board with the good caps from my old Mega Drive. (I don't really need to do anything on my end when it comes to that, though, since I'm gonna start working later hours this coming weekend. )



--Victor Golf Charles

 

You should recap the whole machine btw, not just 1 board.

 

^this. The last SegaCD 1 I worked on had all SMD caps leak but thankfully no damage. The rest didn't look too healthy either.

 

I have one that only the bios boot screen has sound but not music cds or game music but i will investigate i did replace the caps not the smd ones yet if only someone uploaded the service manuals.

I have a motherboard that makes out its reading but not and the drive was tryed and works on other model one so that is the motherboard.

As for the power board i will re flow the sound ic chips i did it on a Amiga cd32 when i recapped the board it still had some missing sound re flowed all the sound chips and worked again.

 

My boss should have all the good caps installed by tomorrow.



--Victor Golf Charles

 

There is a thread on sega-16 where i took a pic of what the smd caps can look like. Page 7 i think, they most certainly need to be changed! You have done the right thing.

*edit* link to Sega-16 pics and capacitor list

http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showth...-repair-thread&p=546388&viewfull=1#post546388

 

The vaule of the caps there are 0.1uf 25v