Bandai Intellivision diagnosis and major repair
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- Опубліковано 29 кві 2018
- The Bandai Intellivision was the Mattel-licensed version of the Intellivision released in Japan by Bandai Electronics. It's pretty rare, and I have one. Unfortunately, mine has never worked properly - it's got a stuck high bit in the character generator that corrupts all text and numbers on screen. Join me as I attempt to repair this problem with the help of a donor system and some helpful people at AtariAge. I'll warn you now - it turns into kind of a rabbit hole.
A few answers to some common comment questions I've gotten:
Q: Why not just get a better soldering iron to get the shields off?
A: I do have an adjustable temp soldering station that can get up to 900 degrees F (the Aoyue 469). The problem with taking the shields off is the solder behind the tabs that there's no easy way to suck out. It's not just solder laying across the top. Partly this is down to my own skills, and yes, partly it may be my equipment. But I think mostly it's just a tough desoldering job - many people who have worked on Intellivisions have complained about getting the shields off regardless of equipment, and that's usually on the US model that I didn't have any problem with. The Japanese model is... something else. It's obviously not meant to be serviceable.
Q: Did you replace all the chips in the Bandai system or only the SRAM chip?
A: I did end up putting the Japanese model back to stock except for the SRAM chip, power ribbon cable and sound chip socket. Those are the only new components now in my Bandai Intellivision.
Q: Did you try the Japanese SRAM chip in the US system?
A: Yes. It did the same thing.
Q: Why not use flux and braid/wick?
A: I did! I just didn't include it in the video because it was boringly unsuccessful; it just didn't do anything with that solder under the tabs. Different people have better or worse luck between braid and solder suckers. I happen to do better with suckers. Despite the impression I may give off in the video, this isn't my first time soldering. I have all the normal stuff and I know the right ways to use it; I'm just not as good at it as some who do it every day.
Q: Did you know the sound chip socket is flipped? The notch goes on the other side!
A: I just didn't pay any attention to that because it doesn't matter in this case. I would have bought a socket without that notch if it was the cheapest one that would have worked. What matters is the orientation of the chip on the board, and I have other references for that. In hindsight, I would have paid more attention to the socket orientation (or intentionally bought one without a notch) to cut down the number of comments about it, though.
If you're interested, here's the original thread about this repair on AtariAge: atariage.com/forums/topic/2684...
And if you need it, the Intellivision power ribbon replacement discussion/tutorial: atariage.com/forums/topic/2581...
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Great video! I absolutely love diagnostic and repair videos on old electronics. As well, I love your particular style of being very clean and careful. Make more videos like this!
Wow. That is a piece of art. I never would've guessed that the Intellivision was so well-engineered... From that crazy RF shield, to the impressive heat sinks, and finally, my favorite aspect of oldschool electronics; the hand-routed PCB traces. (I'm a sucker for those flowing free-form style traces.) And all the chips are socketed!!! Beauty!
This reminds me of when I first got into collecting NEO-GEO MVS cartridges, I got a copy of King of Fighters '97, and all the text, health bars, and mini character portraits, were corrupted. Turned out there were broken traces coming from the 8x8 tile ROM. (Enabling/disabling layers in an emulator allowed me to conclude that they were all 8x8 tile sprites.)
Great video! This channel and others like it have really become an inspiration for getting myself into computer building, retro computers and getting back into retro gaming consoles. I'm not sure I would've ever opened up a PC to look inside it, much less start building them as projects, so thanks for giving me the courage to start down this road. My wife may not be thrilled with my new hobby but I'm sure enjoying it. Thanks!
Good to see everything is back in working order! Old electronics like this have always fascinated me. Back in high school, I'd always be working on different pieces of electronic equipment in my tech class, I even ripped apart some of my own systems like my original Xbox (I came up with a light mod for the case as part of a hardware assignment) and even my NES. My dad has an Intellivision that doesn't work anymore, I took a crack at repairing it in that class but never did figure out what the problem was. Great video as always, hope to see some new content soon!
This video is inspiring me to fix an old Channel Master portable reel-reel tape recorder that I have had laying around for a while now. You went through all that trouble, and eventually, you came out in the end with a fixed system.
I grew up in those days. It's so nice to see someone care enough about the systems to tackle a significant repair job like this. Really, it was more of a restoration than a repair. Well done!
Awesome, congrats on getting that rare variant of an awesome system back up and running👍
Nice video! Really glad you were able to get it working properly, these kinds of projects always turn out to be complete pains in the ass and it seems this was no exception.
Nice to see some love for the Intellivision port of Demon Attack too! :p
You took me back!! I remember owning the intellivision and having great times with it!!
What an adventure! Props for sticking with it and sharing the results with us. You could have abandoned it - Tossed it into a pile of lost projects and never told us about your experience. I keep telling myself I need to pick up an Intellivision, but I guess the right deal just hasn't come along yet. Definitely need that version of Demon Attack. Look forward to more of your content.
There absolutely were times when I thought about giving up on it. But for one thing, there aren't a huge number of these Bandai Intellivisions around. I wanted to save one of them. And also, having started filming the repair for UA-cam, I really didn't want to give up on that either. Plus it was a learning experience for me too. Before doing this I was nervous about even freeing the motherboard from the shielding. Now I feel pretty confident in fixing a lot of potential Intellivision problems.
You can get a regular Intellivision for not much money on Ebay. I love the system; it's a worthy alternative to the arcade-based machines of the era. Intellivision had mostly original games that I think were usually deeper than the most popular games on other systems of the time.
Great video! Must have been a satisfying feeling to get the problem fixed. :)
It always makes me happy to see someone get an intellivision working again. It was my first game console as well, with a Commodore Vic-20 shortly after.
Very well done fella, im proud of ya for keeping this old stuff alive. and BTW the music is awesome.
Brilliant video! Has made me make a mental note to ask my father to keep hold of the intellivision and binatone consoles in his attic, fond memories of playing these as a kid.
Really late to the party!
I have to give you props for your diligence here! I didn't know (or remember most likely) there was a Bandai Intellivision.
It's still one of my favorite systems and I'm eager to play the Amico next year!
What a great video. I really enjoyed watching this. Keep that donor machine in storage. You never know what other parts you may need out of it in the future.
"ONE MONTH LATER" the sign of a really good tech repair video.
Jonothan Thrace As ave says "leave it sitting on the healing bench".
Woo! Wheeler Dealers! Glad you got it working. I got nervous for a second.
Love Wheeler Dealers... Edd China is actually a big influence on my videos.
That's great, love the show myself. Probably also why I've grown to love your channel, too!
Mr Edd china lives 20 miles from me! hes a lovely man
Great video! Nice to see how things get solved!
Great job. I did a mod to mine adding a composite video out since I didn't feel like buying a TV with an analog tuner. It actually went pretty smooth I have to say. Thanks again for the video!
Im sorry you went thru so much trying to get this to work, as the SRAM was my first thought after seeing the corruption on the text. I'm sure the other 2 chips were a good guess but on any graphics corruptions on my early graphics cards, 90% of the time, the problem was the onboard RAM. I was only lucky enough that my first few graphics cards were simply remove one bank of ram and replace with another. And seeing those corruptions generally meant that another RAM chip was fried. Nowadays a console wont even turn on if theres a problem with the memory, making diagnosis way harder. Not to mention that the RAM is usually soldered direct to the motherboard now.
Im glad you got it working though, well done dude. Entertaining as always :)
Love to see an old system working again. I recently fixed up a rubber key ZX Spectrum with a dead RAM chip and faulty keyboard. Feels great to restore a bit of video game history. I agree with your stance on premptive re-capping wholeheartedly. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
Great job, by the way. Good to see you got it working.
Beat Takeshi appeared in the Japanese Intellivison commercial? You learn something new every day.
I used to play this console when I was something like 7 or 8 years old. I could never figure out what console it was, but I remembered the games and how the thing looked. When I saw the thumbnail of this video, I instantly recognized it. Now I know!
Triple Action Racing, Triple Action Battle, and Motocross (I had to look at screenshots and see which ones I recognized) were my favorite games on it. I hardly remember them though, I was pretty young. I used to play them two player with my cousin when we visited my grandparents house. They didn't keep the console when they moved, sadly. I believe they had the initial US release version, without any of the later versions/accessories.
I'd like to play it again someday, those games are kind of special to me.
Now for the full disclosure... The console was originally for my mom and uncle when they were teens, it was around 20 years old by the time I played it.
Those are three games I never actually played when I was a kid! In fact I still might not have ever done so.
One of my first ever videos was basically a retrospective on the Intellivision - I'd probably have made it a bit differently at this point, but check it out if you feel like it: ua-cam.com/video/bZbrgOUgtp0/v-deo.html
Awesome video dude, looks like you spent a lot of time on this system
You seem very patient, well done
Bravo! I’ve made some similar repairs to some of my consoles and it never goes as planned. I also filmed them and enjoy sharing with the community. Wow, Demon Attack looks great. I’ve only played the 2600 version (which I love). Great job!
I just found your channel and this is the first video of yours I have seen. So do not know your level of electronics repair but let me say this, Great pair! This is the kind of stuff I do all the time. I have been restoring vintage equipment for many years. It is fun and satisfying at the same time. Regarding your comment about recapping....Most capacitors only have a shelf life of about 10 years. Although a capacitor my look fine or even check fine on a capacitor meter, it could have an issue with ESR (Equivalent series resistance ) The capacitor basically turns into a resistor. This can cause power supply voltages to drop, obsessive heat and cause IC's to fail. Some of these chips are getting hard to find. Again good job on the repair. Liked it very much.
Thanks! My level of electronics repair is probably somewhere between beginner and intermediate. I'm still learning - I learned a lot in making this video. And my soldering skills are hopefully improving with time.
I have recapped a few different components, but more often than not the electrolytic caps I take out are fine (I test them afterwards), and as I think this video showed, just taking a board out of an old device like this can lead to other, actual problems. For example, replacing those big caps on the power board here would still have required disconnecting that power ribbon cable, and just removing it one too many times is what caused it to fail spectacularly. So I don't like to recap unless there's some evidence of a cap problem. (Which I know does happen, and then I'm fine with doing a recap.)
Phew! You have patience!!! Good luck man!!!
Hey guys - I'm getting some great comments on this video, so thanks for those and keep them coming! One thing I will suggest is to read the full video description, because I've now answered a couple of the common comment questions I'm getting in there. I love answering comments but I might not answer repeated ones individually. Thanks!
Modern Classic Can i mail you my non working intellivision? id of course pay you
Sorry but gotta say this, you really should do the preemptive maintenance It's very much possible, that the ram died because of bad condition psu.
Also you really need to get proper soldering tools or you'll just make more damage.
@@jarnoob Yeah, I have to agree. Not preemptively replacing caps on these old system is not a good idea. One of the reasons C64 computers die is because the caps in the power supply go bad and then it sends 15-20vdc or so down the 9volt line. Unfortunately they are all epoxied into the C64 power brick, but regardless bad power caps can be a system killer. Working on old boards can be finicky because it's easier to lift traces either due to the epoxy holding them to the board being aged or just not being up to modern specs. I do this type of work often and with better tools nothing done in this video is more than a couple of minutes of work. I do realize that not everyone wants this as a hobby that they have to spend money on and he did a great job with the tools he had.
Just subscribed. I enjoy watching your retro-related videos :-)
That's awesome. I was not aware of this release!
A hint when doing this sort of comparative analysis (where you have one, known good unit), is to put a small dot of paint of one color on all the chips from one board, and a different color dot on the chips on the other board; that way, you can tell at a glance which board (good or bad) the chip came off of. Also, put a dot of paint on the board somewhere where there’s no circuit traces (in case the paint is conductive.)
Thank you for offering your content in 4K resolution!
Absolutely loved this video..... 100% subscribed!! Great stuff
Awesome video repair as always
You are the master of finding old 80s commercials :)
Seems like almost everything's available on UA-cam these days :)
Well done for sticking with the problem till you fixed it.
I have two NA units, purchased via Ebay about 8 years back and will composite out mod one of them...my neighbor owned one back in the day and there were some very fun titles to play such as Night Stalker, D&D, etc. Nice to see most chips socketed and not just surface mounted.
Great informative and sensible videos! Thanks!
Price is Right fail horn was spot on funny! Great choice! Needed that laugh. I love old electronics, please continue the work and videos! It's nice to know not all of this stuff is being thrown away.
I'm sure there are lots of people out there asking "why fix this stuff?". The simple answer is, if you have to ask then you probably wouldn't understand. The longer answer has to do with the appreciation for how and why things work added to the love of technology that has a nostalgic meaning. Well that's my opinion anyway. Cheers.
You are right! Though luckily I haven't gotten many "why fix this stuff?" type comments on this one yet... but those usually come later when UA-cam decides to show a video on its homepage or in recommendations. I'm sure they will come, and your answer to them is the same as mine.
I got my Intellivision back in 1979, right as it was going into wide release! I loved that console, and to this day is my most beloved system! The only other console I ever bought was the Nintendo 64. I wish I still had my Intellivision. The PC Emulation 'Nostalgia' does a great job of re-creating the Intellivision games, but not having that controller sorta takes away from the experience. One of these days I promised myself I'd find one again, in working order, and with games. My all time favorite games were: TRON Deadly Discs, D&D Treasure of Tarmin, Demon Attack, and Utopia! Those games were played by myself and my friends back in the early 80's for HOURS! Miss those days!
Love your intro, nice and short. Thanks.
Awesome video,so glad it was on my recommend
Yeah, I used to have my own vintage gaming/computing online shop, and I occasionally would have to fix an Intellivision. Almost every time it was a bad chip. When I first started watching this and you were showing the symptoms, my first thought was it's probably the STIC, maybe the SRAM, and sure enough! And yeah, desoldering anything with that much grounding/shielding is always a pain in the butt to get the solder to melt away. An adjustable temperature soldering iron is good for that, so you can jump up the heat because that's a lot of metal to try to heat up to get the solder to melt, and it's very difficult for a standard iron to get hot enough to do a job like that. Glad you finally got it working again!
Thanks - my soldering iron actually does allow for turning up the temp, but others have suggested that it just doesn't have enough thermal mass. I'm not a soldering expert so I'm sure it's something to do with that. I may have been able to get it hotter than I did; my iron can get hotter than most consumer irons, and I'm usually pretty cautious about really cranking it up. But I don't think it occurred to me to try, since the solder *was* melting, I just couldn't get enough of it off to free the tabs.
Yeah, getting that shielding off is a big pain. I have a few different irons. One is a 60W, and even that one has trouble on stuff like that. Most of the time on these classic consoles, it's usually a chip that fails that is the culprit. Most of the broken Atari 2600's I've gotten were because 1 or more chip failed in it and needs to be replaced.
One thing I do when i use my desoldering tool (just like yours) -- i keep a small disposable tupperware-style container on my workbench for trash. It's great for clipped leads, wrappers, and also for catching all of the removed solder from the plunger when you push the thing down to get it ready again. Otherwise you get bits of solder everywhere. :)
Man, this was my all time favorite console system. I was undefeated in several hundred games of Sea Battle.
I can't stand using desoldering braid but this is one instance where I would definitely use it. That is way too much solder to use a desoldering pump, at least a mechanical pump. You're a better man than I.
At the 19:16 min mark, I would have pulled the chips out of that bandai board, tossed the board and looked for a "works with broken controllers" American version on ebay for $40. Kudos for the persistence!!!
Excellent job!!!
wow, that was a clean fit, thanks for the video, worth it
As an old programmer, I was almost jumping through the screen saying "it's the ram.. it's the character ram".. Notice that the sprites were all ok. That's the U2 SRAM (system ram where the text-character is copied to and remapped or changed to be non-sprite graphics).
Sorry that ya had to go through all that.
Not that it will help, but if you DO ever have to do something with desoldering -- try desoldering WICKs.
I can't get wicks to work at all. I have one and have tried using it many times (it's what I started with, many years ago), including on this project. When I couldn't suck out the solder under the tabs, I tried switching to the wick but gave up on that almost immediately. There's just no way to attract solder that's 2-3 mm away and stuck underneath something onto a wick, or at least I couldn't get it to happen.
Bingo.
I wonder if the chip might still be good.
Just dirty contacts maybe?
Me too! I'm saying "Video RAM!" But he just keeps pulling and f-ing with all the wrong chips. I found this video very hard to watch. What happened to checking the power supply and capacitors? Its pretty much the first thing I do anymore. Saves a lot of messing around.
You are a very smart man.
Proud owner of a still-working Intellivision
Great video! Subscribed!
Very nice video, thank you!
I am suprised you got the suggestions you did, it was pretty clearly a ram issue from the visuals.
Great video.
This might be my favorite old game!!!
nice work! doesn't matter how you do it as long as you can do and undo it.
i have an Intellivision II. always found the side buttons to be too stiff and the plastic number overlay has since deteriorated (i know, there are replacements, and i should look at replacing them). But the slip in overlays for the games i always found neat and unique
I completely agree with your philosophy about replacing parts on vintage electronics - "If it's not broken, don't fix it." It's better not to mess with something unless there is actually something wrong with it. Now, if you were working on a REALLY old antique, like a vacuum tube radio, then yes absolutely replace the old electrolytic filter capacitors because they definitely will fail and cause damage. But on more modern (ish) solid state electronics, I wouldn't just go in and willy nilly replace stuff without a good reason.
Don't you just love these old systems that you don't have to wait for them to boot up so that you can start playing?
loved burger time ..use to played it on my Intellivision in the 80s!!
So much over engineering with the shielding. I'll bet the Japanese one could survive an EMP blast.
More like not blasting you away with the boards EMP. Back then with careless layouts and higher voltages they would create so much more emissions than things today.
I used to own one of these and waited like 6 months after ordering it until i got it. Never seen inside before pretty impressive compair to Atria 2600
The Intellivision was also my first "real" game console, though not my first one....the Fairchild Channel F was my first, but it was rather poor in the over-all games selection and graphics.
Wow, I don't think I've ever even seen a Channel F before in person. Now I know why.
Modern Classic (with Intellivision, no less!), VWestlife, and LGR all release videos on the same day? What is it, Christmas?
Well, I've got some watching to do too then :)
That would explain the sweater...
All the hand desoldering looked so painful. When I worked in the industry we used a hollow tip vacuum powered desoldering tool. Don't know what they go for on ebay, but would definitely be worth the investment if you plan to do more vintage circuit board repairs
There are times when I wish I could reach through the monitor and go back in time to when you were making the video -- as soon as I saw the corrupted background tiles I started yelling "RAM! It's the RAM!" and then watched the entire video to see how long it would take for you to find this out :-) The tile graphics are redefined in RAM, so if they're defaulting to something else, your RAM is bad. (Colecovisions have this problem too, if you ever run across the same issue.)
Well, I was going by the advice I got :)
I've found to desolder large areas it helps to add solder to the tip when you first start, the molten solder will conduct heat better to the "blob" than a soldering iron alone.
15:20 Look at that beautiful vintage PCB! Look at the trace layout! That's a hand drawn PCB. OMG I hope you don't butcher it dude! continuing...
We had one of those in the early and mid 80s. It was my 1st video game system. Spent many hours playing AstroSmash. Then came the NES.
Snafu is pretty good.. i have american model 1 and will never give it up.. works great after throughly cleaning it. Old 80s electronics were really built to last for years. My 1979 apple ][ still works. Caps are great and the board has had no issues.
That Demon Attack brought back some memories...
You need a bigger soldering iron to get those shields of. More wattage, more flux. With that tiny soldering iron you're never gonna get that solder to flow properly.
Definitely, a large chisel or similar tip for large solder joints and a small chisel tip for normal soldering. Then he can lower the temperature quite a bit and get cleaner solder joints without solder oxidising. And throw that thin pencil tip into the garbage, it's useless!
It's not just the tip, it's the cheap Aoyue :( I had an Atten once, gave it away in the end for exactly this reason :/
He's using a conical tip, It has almost no thermal mass. He just needs to pick up a chisel tip. A large chisel would make that really easy, but a moderate sized one will make a world of difference.
It would need to be a tip the size of your fist to make up for the lack of power from the soldering station. I don't know why they can't make cheap temp controlled irons which don't have this problem, but they never seem to be able to.
Pfft, your puny little chisel tips. Knife tip is where it's at!
Aoyue is a bit better than Atten... but there's a new kid on the bloc, various T12 clone soldering stations. The regulation on those is EXCELLENT, and they can deliver 75W of power.
Then again, for an occasional ground plane, you can just break out a big old 150W soldering gun. Those with a trigger and a piece of thick wire bent into a U-shape going into two connectors as a tip. No real necessity for a temperature controlled soldering station.
Oh another thing that can help with such things - and be useful in other ways, such as hot air soldering, or when you need to delaminate something flat that's been glued together - a preheater. Nowadays cheap 3D printers are popular, right? And that means cheap replacement parts, because things go bad a lot. One of those parts is a sub $10 heated bed - actually just a simple PCB with a long winded trace acting like a big flat resistor. You put it on some standoffs, to get it a couple centimetres off your desk, hook it up to a 12V supply that can do 100W, and after maybe 10 or 15 minutes, they'll get up to 100--120 degrees C. They don't go much higher than that, usually, but better check because they aren't all up to spec. That shouldn't damage components or connectors, and won't desolder anything, but soldering even with a wimpy soldering iron on ground planes becomes easy, as the iron needs to supply a lot less heat.
Entertaining video as always, but what I didn't get in the end: Did you put back all the original chips from the Japanese board, except the faulty S-RAM of course (since you found out that the S-RAM was the culprit while the others should be fine) in the end?
Yes, sorry if that wasn't clear. I edited down about 20 hours of footage into this 27 minutes, so it was a little difficult for me to tell if I was cutting too much or leaving too much in. But in the end, the only things I replaced in the Bandai Intellivision were the SRAM chip and the power ribbon cable. Oh, and the sound chip socket (but not the sound chip).
Wow, I see that I replied to this 2 years ago. But I've since worked on quite a few Intellivisions since then. The White colored PCBs appear to be more common on earlier model Intellivision units as I've seen that in at least one standard 2609 model and most of the SVA versions. I have also seen at least 3 different types of VRAM in these. Both of yours in this video are using the GTE version chips but I've seen other Intellivisions that use 4 smaller dip package chips with different trace layouts to match. But I state all of this because I had an SVA that was working but all characters were messed up. Same as you I did the swap on all the chips and replaced all of the older white sockets with new dual wipe sockets. Eventually, I replaced out the HI and LO VRAMs next to the STIC and on mine, both of them were bad. So it would seem that those chips are prone to failure 40 years in on the life of the system.
Looks like the plastic on that socket was the failure point - seems to be a pattern in all "vintage" manufactured goods from the 70's on up
I've never heard you swear before, and I got a good laugh out of it because it was so surprising.
I did cut out the big "F**K" when I lost power, though I almost left that in too.
How did your American unit work with the swapped-in chips?
It's only the one chip, the SRAM. I tried it; it did the same thing in the American unit.
Hey! I like Burgertime. I used to have an old LCD handheld version of the game that I got very good at. Also, how do you get your tuner up to channel 95? I know that's the frequency used on Japanese consoles, but my VCR only goes up to 83, and I think so did most CRT televisions.
Belated congratulations on repair.
Do you know where your box was made?
I showed your video to my father who was the Mattel Engineering Manager who originally moved production from USA (Pennsylvania) to Asia (Hong Kong) and yours looked closer to Hong Kong style manufacturing. They tended to use lots of solder and use extra employees to clean up connections.
He also setup the test and repair facility in USA (City of Industry CA) with 1500 specialized test benches to test components and boards etc. so he was familiar with weak points.
The first thing I thought of when I saw the graphics glitch was bad RAM or video RAM. So far I haven't had to fix my Intellivision, but I did add a whole bunch of vent holes in the controller storage area. These systems always ran hot and often died if used for 24 hours or more.
I had multiple units of that version. They were sold at BigLots at the end of the Intellivisions life.
hello, great video. I have one with a white mother board in it but it does not say Bandia on the top. is this still the japan ver?
What a pain in the ass that looked like. Congrats on getting it working.
Man, that crunching sound at 13:00 made my electronic little heart ache badly hehe.
Oh there were times when I really thought I had broken something. (And technically, I did with that power cable, but not sure it could have been avoided given how many times I had to plug and unplug it.) I've never experienced sockets that are that seized before.
Well, heart-wrenching noises or not you did good. The old trooper is up and running. Well done. =)
I still remember my Intellivision, I think the snafu game music will never be forgotten! Classic :)
That's Murphy's Law - it's always the last one you check. It's like when I lose something, it somehow always ends up being in the last place I look.
I had never seen one of these boards before. Did they do those traces by hand?
So the culprit SRAM chip works on the donor machine? Did you replaced the socket? I'm suspecting it is the socket than the chip. Congrats on getting it working though. Great video.
Did you try the American reassembled with the Bandai sram? Given that it was hard to get in/out, maybe it was an oxidation/contact issue and the chip isn’t actually bad.
cool vid. thank for posting. i love retro gameing
As soon as I saw your issue I thought 'video memory'... I used to see video issues like that all the time on PC video cards and it was always the video memory going bad. I think that 'SRAM' chip was your video memory. That is the chip I would have started with.
When I saw my phone was full of all the things I couldn't read or see anymore and had to do some soldering. I got some cheap reading glasses from the drugstore: World of a difference! Real time macro vision is bliss! But just a warning: I know buying reading glasses means you're becoming an old man and I was ready for that. But I wasn't ready for seeing it when I looked in to a mirror the first time wearing them.
Awesome video and repair !!! Do you know if the Bandai version can be used in our North American power outlets? I was going to buy one but the Japanese seller stated that it's a Japanese electrical plug and needs to be modded for NA. Maybe the Bandai came out in two versions - because the electrical plug and power board would not be compatible with NA outlets - and as I told my wife ... if I play one 20-hour game of Space Spartans on it, it may cause a bonfire :) I'm just sticking with the good old fashioned NTSC version :)
I'm happy to see you got it working. That Japanese model is rare indeed. This was my first game console as well only I had the Sears version. Not quite as rare but rare-ish. I remember my Atari friends coming over and cursing at the Intellivision controllers. They found it difficult to adjust from using joysticks. lol. Is your American donor system now out of commission? Is it feasible to find a RAM chip for it and get it running? Nice work btw.
As far as I know the only way to get an SRAM chip is with another donor system. The reason I picked this system as a donor is that it was going in somebody's scrap heap anyway - I paid $20 for just the bare system, and it's got those balls on the controllers that are epoxied on. The controllers would need to be replaced to restore it, which also means taking them off some other system. We're at the point with Intellivisions when replacing any actual component generally does mean sacrificing one system to save another. I could have bought a completely broken system as a donor, but I didn't know exactly what was wrong with the Bandai so I wanted one I knew was technically working. I at least used a cheap, common, loose one that had been modified.
(It's also good to have future spares. Now I have almost a full system's worth of good components to raid should anything else go wrong on my two working Intellivision I's.)
At the "no power" point, you had the telly set to channel 95. Was that compatible w/ Japanese channels 1 or 2 (think that was the selection)?
Yes, Japanese channels 1 and 2 roughly correspond to US channels 95 and 96. I did try channel 96 as well just in case I flipped the switch by mistake; I just cut the clip in the video before that point. But if you watch through the video, you'll notice that any other time I turn it on, it was on channel 95.
I've got a brown Intellivision in storage (pretty sure it's the model II and probably not a Bandai but mostly the same machine) and it worked when I first bought it ten years ago but the controllers didn't work because the contact membranes inside them were shredded. I bought some contact membranes used that were in better shape, but then the machine itself had stopped working by that point, and I don't have enough nostalgia for the thing to keep working on it. I've got a bunch of games that I'd like to play though, especially Tron Deadly Discs, but I'll probably just buy a refurbished one or something if I want to play the games.