What's this Mega Drive mod do?

Opened up my megadrive 2 the other day to clean it up and resolder the power connector and find this?
What is it and what's it for?

 

Not a mod. The AC jack was replaced, and you have to wire it that to in order to fix it fully.

 

So that's what it is. But why does the av jack also have a cable soldered to it?

 

How so? those wires are just connecting to things that should already be connected.

Just looks like bad joints and rather than resoldering them, someones just added some wires - seems very odd.

 

yeah makes no sense to add the black wires - also there is a solder crack on the middle pin of the power connector, better do a reflow OP

 

They probably did resolder them, they'd have to try quite hard to leave those cracks intact like that while adding the wires.

That's what I meant by resoldering. The power jack was sort of loose so I meant "reflow". Those wires were already there when I opened it up.
What's the white wire for?

 

I have opened MANY Genesis/Mega Drive 2s. Probably about 15-20 of them. Most every single one I've ever seen have those wires on the bottom. Looks totally factory too since even the joints on the wires are broken on a lot of them. Totally normal, not a mod, doesn't mean it's been replaced at all, too many of them have it.

I can take a picture of some Genesis 2 boards I've got around.. same exact thing.

Some wire jobs on these boards are different, but are still the same "mod" looking kind of thing.

 

Please do, that would be interesting to look at.

 

They didn't try that hard: braid, solder pump, flux and fresh solder would've fixed it in 2 minutes.

 

VA1 board.



VA1.8 Board.

 

Maybe you misunderstood. If they were simply trying to add the cables then that would have been pretty hard to do while KEEPING the cracks. Obviously there wouldn't be any cracks there. Which hints at the idea that those cracks appeared after the cables were soldered in place.

 

Kind of a weird engineering solution, imo. It looks as if they misdesigned the pcb and then were fixing it on the fly like that. But that doesn't seem right either considering that apparently this practice continued through a lot of different board revisions.

 

What's funny is I have another VA1 that doesn't have the wire job at all. The two boards I took pictures of were made by CSK, but the one without the wires was a Sega board.

 

Huh, is that a sega subcontractor? My board has a SEGA logo printed on it.

 

I'm guessing that it is yeah. Being that your board does say Sega on it, it shows that either manufacturer had to do some work on their own port.

 

So you mean it could be just a situation were they were using power jacks that weren't originally designed for the particular boards? That they were using whatever they had at hand? Seems kind of hacky for a big company to resort to these kind of solutions lol

 

I dont understand why though, the picture in the op - the wires basically do nothing.

 

Now I'm thinking that the powerjacks in question weren't made for those particular boards. Having a different design and manufacturers had to resort to using whatever parts they had.
OR they could have had reports of the pcbs being bad in that place so they reinforced it with those cables.
OR pretty much any reason.
That's the thing I don't know the reason for this and want to find out

 

The wires in no way make any difference to it being a different power jack. Where the wire leads from/to is already connected to each other via the traces on the board.

The traces being bad is viable, but on your board - theres no place for the trace to be bad between those 2 spots.

On one of digmacs I could see it being that, possibly.

 

Maybe QA notice those solder joints were prone to breaking so they added the wire so it would still work in that event?