When modding goes bad

tried to do a cex2dex covertion to a 40gb ps3.....bricked it. much to pleasure of the mrs cos the fan was load as a jet engine.

 

I had done electronics repair for years, but was completely unprepared to solder in a PS2 mod chip with standard soldering tools. What a nightmare. At some point, I dripped some solder on one of those tiny SMD chips and connected about a hundred traces together. I think I finally got it all cleaned up, but the mod never worked. I decided then that SMD work with non-SMD tools and no magnification is not wise or maybe even possible.

I also have bricked a Wii by installing the stuff out of order, or the wrong versions...

 

A few years back I thought I fucked up an N64 RGB mod and put the board in my scrap pile, always assumed the video encoder was toast.

Managed to fix the damage and get the RGB working, but it took 3 years to find I could fix it(This is why I now always look over everything)



Worst lasting damage was re-capping an SNES and ripping off a trace. rip

 

I haven't broken anything permanently by modding it but I did lift two traces on my dreamcast when I changed the bios. Had to do some patching for that. I also botched socketing the bios on my Neogeo AES ages ago, apparently damaged a trace that I couldn't see visually. I had to sit with with data sheets for the ROM and M68000 and continuity test the buss and then make a patch.

edit:
Here are some pictures of the Dreamcast mod:

might have been only one pad/trace i lifted but it went to a via under the chip. Had to patch it on the other side of the board:

 

No idea why, but for some reason the original PlayStation I have the absolute worst success rate with (I think 50%). I've done soldering work on many other game systems with multiple different mods such as the Genesis, SNES, N64, Xbox, Xbox 360, Nomad, and more. Hell, even the PSOne I have a 100% success rate with, but half the time I have screwed up the original PlayStation!

First murdered PlayStation - Went in with almost no soldering skills, no technique, everything I did was cringeworthy and wrong. Nothing was sticking onto the system, ended up flooding a resistor off the board that I was supposed to solder to. System would turn on and spin up games but no A/V. Salvaged the modchip out of it later and trashed the rest of the console, huge disappointment as it was my childhood PlayStation from my cousin.

Second murdered PlayStation - I believe this one I had flooded one of the pads off the board accidentally. Maybe my iron was too hot? Not sure, but these systems feel a bit too fragile. This one booted up but did not spin any discs. Trashed.

Third murdered PlayStation - Don't remember what I did to this one, I just remember by the end it wasn't working.

 

I ripped out several PCB traces on a GameCube drive when trying to remove a "quick soldered" xenoGC install. Really fucked up the board, thought it was a goner.

After calming down a bit, and finding out where the missing traces went, I soldered wires and ended up with what could be my best trace repair work ever, so the experience balanced out somehow in the end.

Never give up, never surrender.

 

I killed my Super Mario RPG cart while trying to convert it to PAL, TriMesh helped me bring it back to life with a PAL donor cart

 

In 2012, my first SCPH-10000 failed. I got some remote instructions from l_Oliveira on how to fix it, but after repeating the fix for a while (i.e. 2 days), I tore a pad. It didn't end there, but ended when I also lost one of the SMD capacitors near the RDRAM. :/
During the process of resoldering the resistors along the SIF/GIF, some of the resistors popped off and I replaced them. That wasn't really a problem until l_Oliveira discovered that the fault might have been unrelated after all. But if I had more experience on working with SMD components, well... I guess that things might have been different.

In 2013, my second SCPH-10000 developed similar faults as the first one. After attempting the resolder the stuff on the SIF/GIF again (this time, with no mistakes), the set was kept in its box because I didn't dare to try to desolder the clock generator (which has 6 legs lol).

In 2014, I ruined my first SCPH-10190 due to rage (smashed soldering iron into the loose PCMCIA connector legs) and damaged my SCPH-15000's PC CARD connector by jamming the faulty card into it.

Thankfully, it seems that only the plastic housing of my SCPH-15000's PC CARD connector was damaged, so only the faulty network adaptor was damaged.
That was probably my very last attempt to service any hardware on my own because I realized that I never had the capabilities to work on such hardware (SMD stuff) in the first place. Not just because I was angry with other stuff in life back then. :/

So I now have 2 junk SCPH-10000 consoles and one SCPH-10190 that are unusable. Not sure what to even do with them lol.
It seems like a waste to just throw them out, although that might be their fate.

 

LOL!!

 

I got a Saturn mod chip before I knew anything about soldering so I just used electrical tape to hold all the wires in place. One wire attached to one leg on a chip so it constantly would come undone during gameplay and crash the system. I eventually got brave and tried to solder it and quickly dropped a giant blob over a dozen legs. I was at least smart enough to not turn on the system until I cleaned it up, but I was not aware of solde braid or solder suckers so I just chipped away at it. I promptly wrecked the Saturn.

Luckily, I had a spare Saturn and this time I got a friend to help out and teach me a little about soldering

 

Luckily I got into PS2 hacking after the independence software exploit. Don't think I could have coped with PS2 modchips, those things look crazy, they have what 20 wires on them?

 

yes lots of wires its fun to install!

 

During my early days of hardware modding I fortunately came across an Xbox 360 still on blades dash. After successfully applying the band-aid that is the 'reheat' trick, for 0110 error (I won't call it a reflow because it couldn't be further from it). I promptly jtagged it (happy days). Wasn't the neatest soldering but it was my first time. I was using a cheap 40w iron, bleh!

Surprise suprise, after a month the RROD returned. So I set about removing the jtag wiring with my 40w iron and managed to float a 0402 resistor. Your soldering skills definitely improve when painfully trying to resolder a 0402 component to a circuit board with a 40w £3 soldering iron.

In the end I purchased a 25w micro iron and succeeded but I never fixed the RROD.

I look back at the silly mistakes I made in the early days and laugh. Sometimes it's good to learn through mistakes but other times a little research and practice can save a lot of heart ache.

 

I think I have a entire graveyard of broken PS1s,PS2s and Xboxes in the closet. And a bunch of PC motherboards too. Not even kidding.

I also managed to somehow break even some favourite systems I've had over the time. Notable examples are MM3 chipped PS1 (grey) that would work with the lid open, no spring needed, a ONECHIP modded PSone slim (I'll never forgive me for this - I always prefer the NTSC boot screen over the cut-in-half PAL boot screen), my first TSOP'd v1.4 (not a big loss as I now have three Xboxes but still) and a pre-modded v7 PS2 with Modbo 760 on which fuses blew. (and I also broke the chip long time after).

I still remember the funny time when I finally got a good Kemot 30W soldering iron and soldered in my first PS1 modchip without messing up.
I had a good time smashing the cheap (not even Radioshack-level in terms of quality) 40W soldering irons I had.

 

I can honestly say I've never completely broken anything since I started modding stuff. I've lifted a trace here and there and pulled a via once or twice while desoldering, but I've always been able to repair it. Lifted the wrong leg of a chip while region modding a SNES, but I soldered it back down and lifted the correct pin. That's about the worst I've done.
My soldering skills have increased substantially in the last year or so. I'd say I'm not far off Jason's (GameTechUS) level
A few examples of recent mods i've done:

If I've learned one thing over the last couple of years since I got into modding, it's that a good soldering iron and generous use of flux makes all the difference sometimes.

 

Even when I was using the cheapest soldering iron I could possibly find, I've always tended to stick to jobs that I feel are within my abilities, so I haven't really messed up anything whilst modding, the worst results being that the mod just didn't work.

I find that the point when I'm going to make the most damage is usually during disassembly, particularly if it's the first time I'm taking something apart. Recent victims have been a New 2DS XL volume slider and an iPhone 7 LCD ribbon cable.

 

I had an Sony xperia play that had a shorted PA ic.. wasn't paying attention and popcorned the board

 

Yep, this happened the other day. I always hated the quick-solder method of installing these but was in a rush to test some of those new xenogcs and the first install I learned later worked fine (didn't realize both LEDs were red on these), didn't feel like finding my hot air station in a closet so I tried to desolder it with one of those stupid pumps and went I lifted it, it ripped half the pads off the board. Found some forum post from 10 years ago about alternate points and had to run basically every point to the underside of the board to the IC. Real pain in the ass and why I never bother with that install method, I'd rather go with wires so someone else can change it at some point if they want.

Oh man, another story from the other day. I ran out of flux and was touching an SMT chip, the solder popped off the lead and literally landed on two vias-bridging them, next to it and caused it to not boot anymore, it took a solid 15 minutes to even figure out where it had landed. I don't think I've said "are you kidding me" the amount of times I did trying to figure that out and after figuring it out.

 

Years ago, me and a buddy attempted upgrading an OG xbox to 128mb of ram.

Pulling the ram from another board was trivial, we then spent 3 days, soldering, examining under a magnifying glass and testing with a multimeter. Finally we got continuity and put the damned thing back together loosely to give a proper test.

The box booted, XBMC loaded and showed 128mb ram. Success!

Unhooked the box and put it back together proper. Downloaded some roms to see if it would make any difference and set the console back up ready for FTP.

The console never booted again. We never could find the issue.

 

Wow, how old were you guys, story sounds like you were maybe teenagers. Replacing a TQFP-100 and even getting one successful boot sounds like cause for celebration. Is the mod actually worth it, I've got 3 spare OG xbox on hand and I'm bored.