Quick check inside reveals that this is a very nice VA0 mainboard from mid 1991. Visually it looks to be in excellent condition.

By the way: if you want to open up a GameGear you need a 4.5mm bit that’s shaped like… a flower…? Not sure what this is called.

Closer inspections shows signs of corrosion at the capacitors. Yup, we got capacitor plague. No surprise here. This 100uF capacitor near the power connector has corroded terminals.

The NES is a pretty simple machine actually. At the hear we find the RP2A07A CPU clocked at about 1.66 MHz for a PAL machine. It is basically a 6502 with some augmentations. The clock input is 26.6 MHz on PAL and internally divided by 16. It has two audio out pins, one for square wave, the other for PCM and triangle/noise. Attached is a 6116 SRAM chip with 2KB capacity.

The game features lots of cut scenes that tell the movie‘s story. This is extremely useful and also very well done. The graphics are some of the best I have seen on the GameGear. Remember: this is a Z80 system with only a few kilobytes of RAM!

@[email protected] yes it requires a bit more advanced solder skills. If you never soldered before I would advise not to try it. But GameGears can be repaired very well. Lots of replacement parts available. And with a new TFT screen they are immense fun, I think. Pick up a cheap flash cart and go nuts! Total invest with screen and flash cart is not cheap though. Will come to about 120€. Doing only the capacitor replacements is only about 8€ in materials.

The ROM image is not expensive. And the game seems well made on first glance. There seems to be a lot of story, but I am not entirely sure if it is told rather well. Zelda is of course overshadowing this all the time…

The Pros:

• Large gameworld (16x16)
• Nice graphics

The Cons:

• Saves only at certain savepoints
• Music gets annoying quickly

The introduction is quite elaborate and nicely drawn.

@[email protected] DoTT was Mac and PC only afaik. And yes, at least on the PC MM1 was included.

Ultima IV of course has the eight virtues as its main theme. The quest of becoming a good person.

@[email protected] I wouldn't say "poor man's". They basically invented the graphical adventure genre and were feeling their way around how to make games, and how to make better games. Yes, they were more quantity than quality, compared to LucasArts, but I give them the benefit of doubt, as it was definitely a pioneering task.

@[email protected] Oh yeah, I LOVE the SID! I should have specified PC / MS DOS

@[email protected] the controllers are five years old. The sticks are pretty inexpensive on eBay, so I thought: what the heck, replacement seems simple, less hassle than to send them in. I picked a random seller from Germany who had good reputation.

The other part of the system is the RP2C07 PPU. This is the graphics engine of the system. It‘s the chip that produces the video signal, draws all the tiles and sprites. It too has access to dedicated 2K of SRAM in the form of a 6116 chip. On this board this chip is a different variant by Goldstar (today known as LG).
In the lower right corner a small Nintendo branded DIP16 chip is visible, the so called CIC, which handles the reset circuit and also deals with copy protection.

Oof. That doesn’t look so great. The Vcc is exactly where it should be (cyan curve) but the clock is a flat line (yellow curve). No wonder there is no video output. Another issue: the working board has a consumption of 400mA while the broken one uses 800mA. Something is sinking quite a bit of power.

The board from the first post was actually working. But this one is really broken. I swear! It has no video output. So let’s check what’s going on. I connect my scope probes to Vcc and clock pins on the PPU.

Solved it. You need to make a custom mapping with WASD. I though one was already using it. But port 1 had the predefined OMF mapping, and port 2 had numpad mapping, which equates to the same thing.

@[email protected] that‘s a solid one!nice.

@[email protected] ips

Quickly thereafter we meet Kronos the Magician. He offers us a note that we are supposed to bring to Erik the King.