Sega CD with bad caps

My Sega CD model 2 has been developing a problem with recognizing discs. Out of the seven NA games and nine Japanese games I have, it will only acknowledge about six of them. And the games it does read, it plays with absolutely no problems. No freezing, music starts over fine, and load times are normal. I was told by Tiido that the machine needs recapping, particularly the CPU board. I plan on having that done in the near future. In the meantime, should I just avoid using it altogether? I'm not an expert in electronics. Is it bad to put a charge on caps that are already shot? Just how urgent of a problem is this?

 

I wouldn't use it again if the caps are shot, it could cause them to leak more.

Having said that get it repaired ASAP, the stuff in capacitors is corrosive and will eat away at traces on the circuit boards.

Normally Sega were pretty good with capacitors (apart from Game Gears) so it may be worth checking the disks. My Sega CD is very picky about reading disks and won't read some disks which don't have any scratches that I can see, it may be worth trying to burn a copy of the games that don't work and see if the copies play.

 

It's weird because all of my NA games used to work flawlessly. I noticed a few years ago when I was using my SCD regularly, some games started acting up. Spider-Man in particular started taking really long to load a level, then the music wouldn't even start playing until I was nearly done with it. It's strange that it just doesn't see games that it used to.

One thing that I remember from 2011 when I noticed this was that any game that I had on a CDR worked just fine. I don't have any CDRs on me at the moment, but I'd rather not use them and screw up the laser.

Update: I opened it up this afternoon and saw no corrosion. None of the caps had that bulged look or wrinkles on the top. That still doesn't necessarily mean they're all ok, so I'm going to have a friend do a recap soon.

Just to make sure I didn't ruin anything by opening it, I tried a bunch of games and I had better results than before. I got everything to at least boot up, even Thunderhawk which is double region locked and shouldn't work with the region free bios alone. A/X-101 worked flawlessly. Ecco 2 worked, unlike before. Silpheed still hangs as soon as the intro starts.

 

Have you tried any copies of the games that don't work?

 

Are you sure your laser lens is clean BTW?