The ghetto mod thread

[momaka]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

I picked up a dead Super Mario Kart SNES cartridge on eBay for next to nothing just before Easter.
...
My ghetto fix, after checking every single chip pin with a multimeter to make sure they weren't damaged, involved scraping some of the varnish from the PCB to get at the broken trace, using a lead pencil to paint over the broken trace and to make some edge connector pins, and finally some silver foil, explained later.
...
By pure coincidence, I still had some Easter eggs lying around that I hadn't eaten - two minutes later I had made a tiny pin out of a foil Easter egg wrapper, folded it with the print on the inside, and simply taped it over the lead pencil trace I had made. I put the cartridge back together without the screws, and flicked the switch on the Super Nintendo expecting the same all nothing but a black screen, only to be greeted with the Nintendo logo, the coin jingle, and finally the Super Mario Kart theme!

Nice ghetto fix there and really cool to see one of these brought back to life!

The only down side is that the foil is very flimsy and probably won't last brushing against the cartridge slot contacts more than a few times, but for a five minute ghetto mod it's pretty good for now.

Also, I think you may eventually get Galvanic corrosion due to dissimilarity of properties between Aluminum and Gold (gold plating.) But indeed for a quick go/no-go test, this was a brilliant fix.

While patching the trace with the pencil worked (I have done this with several cartridges and even an NES console before), making pins out of carbon did absolutely nothing, there was probably too much of a "step" between the pin and the bare circuit board so it was still open circuit.

Graphite, drawn on a thin layer like that, will have a pretty high impedance over the length of the entire trace, so even if it did make contact, there's still a chance it may not be able to carry enough signal current between the cartridge and the board for the two to communicate. So that's probably why it didn't work. Otherwise, imagine if you could just draw traces with a pencil - you could create prototype circuits board right on paper! Actually, I think someone already tried such an invention and it did work - but obviously still only for low-power signal stuff.

Here's how I "fixed" the IR receiver on a crappy off-brand DVD recorder. Replacing the receiver got the remote working, but then I measured a ridiculous pull-up current from the part that it connected to (almost 50mA - probably a blown input). The original receiver worked with a more sane pull-up, so I wired up this buffer.

Cool point-to-point wiring job. The small SMD resistors on the leads of the transistors is a nice touch too.

I was going to try passing video from a VCR through it, but both composite and S-Video outputs suddenly started clipping dark colors to black. I need to figure that out now.

Interesting. I wonder what would cause that.

[lti]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

Here's how I "fixed" the IR receiver on a crappy off-brand DVD recorder. Replacing the receiver got the remote working, but then I measured a ridiculous pull-up current from the part that it connected to (almost 50mA - probably a blown input). The original receiver worked with a more sane pull-up, so I wired up this buffer.

I was going to try passing video from a VCR through it, but both composite and S-Video outputs suddenly started clipping dark colors to black. I need to figure that out now.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

still a very nice trace repair and goldfinger repair tho! thumbs up! try to see if u can get some gold metal polish to clean up and remove the corrosion on the other goldfingers too! corrosion can spread so u must remove the corrosion or u'll be repeating the repair on the other goldfingers as well in some years to come!!

[Heihachi_73]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

I picked up a dead Super Mario Kart SNES cartridge on eBay for next to nothing just before Easter. The seller said it didn't do anything at all even after being cleaned. I plonked it into my Super Nintendo, and sure enough, nothing but a black screen, even though the pins were clean. Last night I had a look at the cartridge after leaving it sitting for over a week.

Turned out that the cartridge had been wet at one stage (luckily the water mixing with a live battery didn't do anything to the chips) which had caused corrosion on pins 50, 51 and 52 as well as on most of the chip legs. On top of that, pin 51 had been ripped clean off, and 50 and 52 were also damaged but still long enough to connect to the console, as shown by the uniform dark marks on all of the pins. The trace going to pin 51 also had the smallest pinhole-sized gap (caused by corrosion) just above the pin causing the connector pin itself to be electrically dead.

My ghetto fix, after checking every single chip pin with a multimeter to make sure they weren't damaged, involved scraping some of the varnish from the PCB to get at the broken trace, using a lead pencil to paint over the broken trace and to make some edge connector pins, and finally some silver foil, explained later.

While patching the trace with the pencil worked (I have done this with several cartridges and even an NES console before), making pins out of carbon did absolutely nothing, there was probably too much of a "step" between the pin and the bare circuit board so it was still open circuit.

By pure coincidence, I still had some Easter eggs lying around that I hadn't eaten - two minutes later I had made a tiny pin out of a foil Easter egg wrapper, folded it with the print on the inside, and simply taped it over the lead pencil trace I had made. I put the cartridge back together without the screws, and flicked the switch on the Super Nintendo expecting the same all nothing but a black screen, only to be greeted with the Nintendo logo, the coin jingle, and finally the Super Mario Kart theme!

Unfortunately I didn't take any before pics, but there was a lot of white and blue crud on the PCB from the water hitting the chip legs and components (resistors etc.). The original CR2032 battery from survived but is a bit low at 2.6V, but still has no trouble keeping the game's save data alive.

The only down side is that the foil is very flimsy and probably won't last brushing against the cartridge slot contacts more than a few times, but for a five minute ghetto mod it's pretty good for now.

[stj]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

wire fanguards

[eccerr0r]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

If you can't put your finger on the fan - need to take finger from the fan.

hmm... design fault?

[momaka]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

my rule,
if i cant keep my finger on a component - it needs a heatsink.
if i cant keep my finger on the heatsink - it needs a fan.

^ This

[stj]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

my rule,
if i cant keep my finger on a component - it needs a heatsink.
if i cant keep my finger on the heatsink - it needs a fan.

[eccerr0r]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

I wonder if I should add a fan to the GMCH on my S775 boards...

[Dan81]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

Since I can't edit the previous comment - in regards to your V6000 - don't really bother with it.

The best you may be able to do to it without literally cutting up the case is add a copper shim on the GF6150 chipset you have.

And on a final note - don't have high hopes for Intel boards - 945 based boards usually tend to suck in terms of features, or have some horribly bad DX9 GPUs (GF Go 7xxx series, up to 7700 I think?) that heat up worse than the sun. The 965 based boards aren't the best either, but at least with those, the 8400M GS isn't that hot over the older 7xxx chipsets. It's been said some came with 8600M GS (the SE variant of the 6500 series) but I personally haven't seen them anywhere else than DV9000, which kinda makes me ask myself why did they go with 8600M GS for Intel PM965 boards on the 9000, and left the 6000 with 8400M? Both the 6000 and 9000 boards are virtually the same, save for a few ports that were placed on a separate PCB for the 9000 and a 2nd HDD bay.

[Dan81]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

An update to my previous comment:

It's pretty hard to cool this 8400M G with just an ABIT cooler it seems. It works but temps now top out at 74*C, which is way out of my comfort zone. I'll probably scrap the idea and order a original G70SC HSF + 9800M GTS. Since it's G92 based, at least it will run cooler than the GF8 series, I hope.

As for the original laptop it came from, it's running well in terms of cooling. The only idea I could think of is find a scrap 5520G/7520G and mount a 8cm fan on top to blow over it as it has bigger CFM than the ABIT cooler if it were to stay in the G70S.

[Dan81]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

Yeah, it's running a bit cooler. Not by much (50-60*C usually, with 65*C at load) but much cooler than expected. I might probably redo it though, except with a bit larger HSF (with same low profile) and a slim 80mm PowerLogic fan fitted on the cover.

[momaka]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

How ghetto is this?
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1598185083
ASUS G70S, with an 128MB Geforce 8400MG out of a dud Acer. Since the original GPU heatsink was trashed (along with the two bad 8700M GTs it had, both were beyond any point of salvation), I made this from a 5520G MXM Geforce and an ABIT HSF out of a NF7-S that was dead. I also added a copper shim inbetween for good contact.

Not gonna lie - that is pretty awesome, actually.

I suppose the 8400MG runs pretty cool too now?

Gives me ideas for my Presario V6000, though I simply don't have the space in there. The stock HP/Compaq cooling is so under-performing.

[Dan81]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

How ghetto is this?

ASUS G70S, with an 128MB Geforce 8400MG out of a dud Acer. Since the original GPU heatsink was trashed (along with the two bad 8700M GTs it had, both were beyond any point of salvation), I made this from a 5520G MXM Geforce and an ABIT HSF out of a NF7-S that was dead. I also added a copper shim inbetween for good contact.

[momaka]

Re: The ghetto mod thread - HIS Radeon HD4670 AGP IO bracket

Video card from this post:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showpo...postcount=4586

It needed an IO bracket, so I made one.


Yeah, she ain't going to win any beauty contests, but the IO bracket fits pretty well otherwise.

Not sure why the VGA port cutout came out so large. I copied the IO bracket from a Gigabyte GeForce 240 GT (shown above) and also the IO bracket from a PCI-E version of the same HIS Radeon HD4670.

So now I'm trying to decide if I should paint the IO bracket (probably white or silver), so that hopefully it blends in a little better. Maybe?

[Dan81]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

I mounted one of my LGA775 heatsinks (a pretty big heatsink from a HP dx2200) using nuts and bolts on a MSI G41T-P26 I have with a Pentium D 925.

Photos coming soon!

[momaka]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

I sure succeeded in fooling you there, then

Yes, that CPU cooler is from socket LGA775. And it's mounted on AMD FM2 motherboard. That's the ghetto part, really, and the point of that post.

[stj]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

i thought it was one of those lga775 chipsets!

[momaka]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

i see i'm not the only one who add's fans to chipsets!

^ Fixed that for you. ^

Yes, I regularly add fans to chipset heatsinks. But that's because most chipsets need one these days. Only chipsets I don't do it to is mostly older stuff, like SiS, VIA, and nForce 2 and earlier.

Also, the board above that I posted is not an Intel with Intel chipset. It is AMD socket FM2 with AMD A75 chipset. These chipsets run cool overall. But still... if a heatsink feels too hot, I add a fan. If not, I do let it be as is (but gain, that is rare anymore.)

[stj]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

i see i'm not the only one who add's fans to the shity intel chipsets!