Do you hate it when you take an old system out of the closet only to find out that
something about it no longer works?
Well, before throwing or giving it away, try these tips.
Unless you have a good working knowledge of electronics, I don't recommend trying
these.
Use these hints at your own risk! Beware of static electricity! use a wrist strap!
These are from personal experience, if you have a tip, submit it
Non working controllers:
I'm sure that controllers are one of the first things to go out on a system. Here are a few repair tips that may enable you to salvage a controller, or possibly the whole system.
If it is an individual controller that doesn't work, try this:
1) Clean the contacts on the controller itself.
This helped fix one of my old SMS controller.
This can be done a couple ways.
- Open the Controller
- You should see several pads and contacts for the buttons and direction controller.
- First try cleaning the contacts and pads with steel wool
- If that doesn't work, try spraying a tuner cleaner on it, or another electronics cleaner I used "radio shack color tv tuner cleaner" cat no 64-4320
- After using the cleaner, wipe away the dirt and liquid crap left over from the spray
If all controllers tried have the same thing not work, or don't work at all, try this:
2) Re-solder the contacts inside the system itself.
This is a LOT riskier than the method above,
but this is what fixed my sms system!
This saved me from having to buy a new SMS
system.
- Open the system, remove all screws until you can access the bottom of the system board.
- Look for any cold solder joints, cracks in the solder, broken wires, etc..
- Use a soldering gun to heat and insert a dab of new solder onto bad solder joints you see
- Test the system.
- If it still doesn't work, try adding some fresh solder onto each of the contacts that look like they go to the controllers. Do the same for any bad solder joints you see.
- Test the system before putting it back together.
It can be a pain to put the system together before testing it, and finding out you have to take it apart again to try give another try at fixing it.
SMS Note
- When looking at the board for the SMS, near the controller 1 contacts, you will notice a Pin that doesn't have any solder on it at all. This may go to a transistor(?). At first, I thought this was the problem. After a lot of testing, and looking at it, I noticed That it didn't have any traces going to the pin. So I gave re-soldering all the pins a try, And it ended up fixing the problem!
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