"I guess. Good thing we're safe. So, anything new with work stuff?"
"Oh, yeah, this guy came in last night just before closing with this ancient console game. He said it wouldn't work and that he needed it fixed by three weeks from tomorrow, oh, I guess that would be three weeks from today. He also said to call him if it was going to cost more than three hundred dollars." Robert pointed at a box full of console, controllers, cables, and a few compact disks. "It's in that box. I've never seen one of those things before, it must be thirty years old."
I looked into the box and saw a game system that they quit making in the late nineties. That's right, last millennium. I whistled. "Man, they sure don't make 'em like this anymore." I swiped off a space on my workbench, scratched my stomach reflexively, and then emptied the box out onto the bench in front of me. "First things first," I said to it. "Let's plug you up and see what happens."
After fiddling with the ancient video game console for about fifteen minutes it was obvious that no power was getting to any of the output cables. No video signal was produced, no voltages on the controller ports, and no signals at the memory card slot. The disk didn't spin and the light wouldn't come on either. The thing was as old as I was; I laughed about that. Laughing was good. I didn't do enough of it, anymore.
"The power supply is bad, at least," I said. You have to talk to yourself when you are working on stuff.
I started with the basic six steps for repair of a game console power supply. Even ancient ones must abide by the repair rules. Simple electronics basics:
1) Open up the game console (this may require a screwdriver, star wrench, or allen wrench).
2) Get out your multimeter (make sure you have good batteries in it) and check all fuses. Replace any bad ones.
3) Plug in your game console, being careful not to touch any open component connections.
4) Check the voltages everywhere first to see where it stops. If there is no power leaving the power supply then that's a good sign the power supply unit is bad.
5) Search through the Framework for hours to find the voltage test points and proper voltages for the particular game system.
6) Since you've proven that the power supply unit is bad, you have to measure the test point voltages to see where there is something wrong in the power supply.
There it was on about the third or fourth point I tested. I got the wrong voltage. Instead of forty-five volts A.C., I got thirteen, so I backed up from that point and found a shorted capacitor. I de-soldered it and replaced it. Then the test voltage read twenty-three volts A.C., so something was still not right. After further inspection I realized that I had read the capacitor wrong and put the wrong-sized capacitor back into the board. So, I de-soldered that cap and replaced it. Bingo, forty-five volts!
Excitement. There's another emotion I hadn't had much of lately.
I repeated the six steps again and found that I now had a good and working power supply unit in the game console. Now the little green light came on and the compact disk began to spin up, but for some reason the system wouldn't read a disk. My guess was that the laser was either out of alignment or the voltage to it was low. I adjusted the alignment screws and had no luck with that. So I checked the voltage trim pots on the motherboard by the laser's ribbon cable. I tested both pots, the FBIAS and the FGAIN and neither one of them were where they should be. I monkeyed around with them for a bit and then, bang! I had a video game playing. Before I closed it back up I dusted it off with an airbrush and also used some Isopropyl alcohol and a cotton swab to clean the lens. All in all, it was a pretty easy fix. Then, just to be safe, I decided to play the games for a bit to make sure the system would be stable over time.
After a while of shooting zombies, the game froze up, a common symptom. The zombies had nothing to do with it; it was the cooling fan not working properly. Without the fan blowing right, the chips on the motherboard were overheating. The fan was getting power, so it was just an old or bad fan. My money was on old. "The fan was lucky; how many people didn't get to grow old," I muttered to myself.
I rummaged around in my junk piles until I found a fan that would suffice. It wasn't exactly the same size and needed half the voltage, which was nothing a little silicone rubber sealant and a twice voltage divider wouldn't fix. This time I killed zombies for two hours and never had a problem.
Then I decided to play all the games that were brought in with the system. They were the old standard compact disks and all of them were scratched and dirty. I cleaned them and resurfaced them and most of them worked. One of them, on the other hand, wouldn't. The disk for a killer zombie game had a crack all the way through in three places. I gently cleaned it, dried it, and then resurfaced it hoping that the clearcoat would seal off the crack enough for the game to work. It didn't. Again back to the Framework, surfing for a few hours for a replacement. Unfortunately, there were none left out there anywhere in the world. The game must have been unpopular and not sold many or very popular and nobody was giving it up.
I had other things to do at work that day so I took a break from the game repair until later that evening. I decided to take the thing home with me and play around with it for a few nights on my own time. I had more resources at home than at the rental and repair store.
After work I packed up the console, the games, and all the myriad cabling and controllers and threw them in the back seat of the classic Cutlass. Fortunately, the rain had stopped and the weather had cleared up to something similar to pre-Rain weather, at least for now. On the way home I stopped by the grocery store; Lazarus was out of beer and I was out of dog food. He shouldn't drink so much. I also grabbed some more chips, cereal, ramen noodles, frozen pizzas, and toilet paper. You can never have too much toilet paper. The young girl at the checkout counter never looked up at me during the entire checkout process. She was cute; I guess I displayed no aspects or traits that attracted her attention. I brushed my bangs off my forehead, scratched my posterior, and proceeded to collect my bags.
I stopped and grabbed a bagful of tacos for dinner; Lazarus likes them about as much as he likes beer. It took three trips getting the video game stuff, the groceries, and the tacos up the stairs to my loft apartment. Laz ran up and down the stairs wagging his tail, panting, and jumping up to my eye level the whole way each time. Well, except for once when he stopped to go on the tree outside the apartment.
"Good boy, Laz. You been bored all day?" I set the bag of tacos down and plopped into my sofa. Lazarus was immediately in my lap and licking my face. I returned the sentiment, "I know, fella, and it's a tough life being a dog ain't it?" I scratched his neck and tugged his ears. "You're my buddy. That's right, boy." Tears welled up and filled my eyes. I was crying again, although Lazarus made me happy. I pulled him to me and hugged him with all my heart and flat-out bawled for a good ten minutes. As the sadness eased slightly—it never seems to go away—I pulled the dog off me and went to the kitchen counter where I found Laz a bacon treat, a peanut butter cookie, and me a couple of Zoloft capsules. I cracked open a forty of Laz's favorite cheap beer and chased down the Zoloft. Likewise, I put some fresh water in Lazarus's bowl and tapped my bottle against it
"Cheers, buddy." I wiped the tears from my face and returned to the sofa with a bag of tacos, my beer, and Laz in my lap. I remained there for a couple of hours until Laz nudged me, explaining that he wanted to go for a walk. So we did.
The next night, after basically the same ritual as the previous night, the previous three years worth of nights, I set the disk up on my Framework/Sequencing computer system at home and played around with it. One of my game copiers was able to read it. Then I burned it on a new disk and tried it. The game got stuck after a few layers. This time I used my copy routine to store the machine code as a text file. Of course, the machine code was encrypted so as to keep hackers from pirating the games, which was exactly what I was doing. But I considered this more of an archaeological project, rather than an illegal copyright infringement. It wasn't hard to break the code; after all, it was nearly thirty years old. One of my simpler decryption Sequences worked fine and gave me the actual code as an output file.