evolvingconsole

Broken

Broken, Console, Microsoft Xbox One

“Broken” Xbox One launch model for cheap

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Recently I picked up a “broken” Xbox One from eBay for $69.99 from a pawn shop seller. I noticed in the photos that all the warranty stickers were in place and the unit did not look like it had been opened or worked on. The description of the problem was “The Xbox One will boot to dashboard and then reboot constantly”. I was not able to hear the fan kicking on so my first thought was it was overheating and powering off. I decided to take it apart and take a look around to see if there was anything obvious. After opening it up and giving it a quick clean up, I could not find anything blatantly wrong with it.

I put the system mostly back together and powered it up with no HDD and was able to see the fan kick on (It was just really quiet) and got the typical error for missing hard drive. But the most important thing was, it did not reboot.. hmm, could it be something with the HDD?

I tossed in a 2TB HDD and followed this tutorial and never looked back.

So all in all it was a corrupted OS and just needed to be re-initialized. Time to check out some of the Xbox One exclusives.

Broken, Game Boy, Mods

Game Boy Advance SP Case Replacment

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I had a back-lit (AGS-101) Game Boy Advance SP that had a broken hinge for a year or so. I picked it up cheap on eBay with the intent on fixing it. I came across a vendor on Amazon that was selling full shell replacements for the SP and jumped on it. I always liked the black SP but the back-lit models did not come in this color. It was a perfect opportunity to accomplish this with a new shell.

As you can tell from the photos below, this thing was in bad shape and needed some TLC.

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After about an hour or so I ended up with a working black back-lit SP.

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I ended up not using the screen protector that came with the Amazon one since the original actually looked fantastic after a good cleaning. I also changed most of the triwing screws to standard screws.

Broken, NEC Turbo Grafx 16

NEC TurboExpress repair

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I bought this 6 or 7 years ago knowing that it was broken, thinking i can fix it at some point. I know these things are a bit hart to find so I figured a broken one is better than not having one.

After unwrapping it I did notice that the shell is in really good shape, that’s a plus. But, I noticed a yellow wire sticking out from the bottom of the shell.

Once opened I seen a few problems. First off the power wires from the battery tray are taped together. Looks like a pretty bad hack job. Then I noticed the yellow wires are soldered (not very well) to some pins on the PCB where the LCD ribbon cable connector was. It must have broke/ripped off and someone tried to do a hack job. I noticed that the LCD ribbon cable is also cut.

After I removed the PCB from the shell I noticed there was a capacitor that was wired off board in what looks like to be one of the capacitors in the audio path. It must have had audio problems and was “repaired”.

What have I done so far:

I desoldered the yellow wires and noticed there was 2 pads that the LCD header was. I bet the 2 pads were lifted when it broke off. So now I need to do some simple continuity test to see if I can pick up the traces from somewhere else.