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Yellow screen after botched AES 3-6 Unibios mod

dweebenhemier

dweebenhemier

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Hello!

Long time lurker, first time poster here!

Last month, with my beginner soldering experience, I thought my first major project being modding my perfectly-working AES 3-6 would be a good idea. Now soldering I'm not horrible at doing but desoldering I was (at the start of the project) HORRIBLE at, the bios IC being the major pain in the ass but I was able to successfully get it to drop out without any damaged traces... (but with a some discoloring on the board after :whistling:) then I noticed the chip above it was drooping out from the heat gun I used (The IC being U35 74HC259). The system worked fine after this, even got unibios socketed and working perfectly. But when I was going to get started on the rgb bypass part of my adventure, I thought I'd fix the mistake I made with the droopy IC. This ruined everything and my sleep-deprived retail-worker holiday rush-brain frustration lead to big apple-core looking vias getting yanked out and some damaged traces.

I very unprofessionally tried to patch it up but now I got the yellow screen of death. I have poked around for continuity on my multi-meter and I feel very lost.

I really wish I didn't mess with my AES in the first place but it is too late for that. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I am very eager to get this baby going again.

Here are some horrible tech-gory pictures down below for reference, and a video of the screen I'm getting with stock bios
 

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Brother you have multiple missing traces.
I feel your pain. I ruined many a board thinking I was good at soldering before getting really good and still ruining a few more.

I think this is saveable being the value of an aes.
You'll just need to hire someone to repair it.
 
That's why you practice in junk pcb before doing the real thing.
You have multiple vias lifted. The wires that you used are too big for that kind of job.You applied too much heat in the pcb.
It's good to have a soldering iron that you can regulate the temperature for that reason.
Desoldering is a pain in the ass and if you can, you should buy a desoldering gun, even a cheap one can do the job.
Now you have to repair the damaged traces but I think in your current level you can make things worse.
I would just send to someone more experienced like the last user said.
 
Hard to tell for sure the extent, but I agree with Misos & Forest that there are multiple broken traces and roasted vias. It happens. Especially on AES PCBs which are known to be cheaply made and not at all tolerant of even moderate heat - installing a UniBIOS, as simple as it may seem, can be a recipe for disaster if you get a bad roll of the dice. It's happened to me!

FWIW, Yellow screen on boot usually indicates a VRAM error.

Would also co-sign on:
  • those wires are too thick for that job;
  • you should practice on junk boards first, not a $300+ home console; and
  • please consider sending it off to someone else for repair
It's admirable that you got as far as you did with your level of experience, but it may be time to pack it up and send it off for a more seasoned eye with the right tools to patch it up. cruzlink2 & ifixretro are on my recommended list, as are various other forum members here who may or may not be accepting repair work at the moment. I am sure they will PM you if they wanna take a stab at it though!
 
you’re not alone. The number of times I’ve gone back to “tidy up” a working mod/repair and ended up un-repairing it…

Luckily the AES is simple enough that it’s not really possible to destroy one with minor rework like this. An experienced tech can patch that up. If you gave them the schematic and board layout from here as @Fluffy mentioned that would help them go faster.

https://github.com/Board-Folk/NeoGeoAES-3.5https://github.com/Board-Folk/NeoGeoAES-3.5

The board in that project is actually a 3-5, but schematic and circuit layout is largely identical.

another alternative is to use this as a way to get (really) good at vintage electronics repair.
As others have also mentioned, will need some new tools and a lot of practise. There are some notes on building an AES reproduction board from scratch here - its very slow work, but very good practise.
https://www.arcade-projects.com/thr...semble-your-new-neogeo-aes-motherboard.26035/
 
Honestly for like 10+ hours of my time I'd rather just send it to someone else and pay them to fix it. But that's just me!

But it's an option worth pursing in the worst case scenario to be sure, or if you want a pristine board without any rework done to it. I don't know that I'd recommend this for a first-time project though, even I decided against it and I've reworked more than a handful of things...
 
To add another piece of advice: heatgun is not really the right tool for through-hole component desoldering. Can you? Sure, but you're likely to cause other damage in the process. Using the right tools for the job will help you avoid some of this in the future.

So those discolored board bits *can* have broken traces in them, especially if it bubbled at all.

Checking for continuity isn't too bad, especially if you have a DMM that will beep at you. I'm sure by now information for the entire board is out there. So you just start on pin 1 of the BIOS chip, and check that each pin beeps out to the place it should go to. Finish that chip, check the next one that you worked on. Then each one you find is broken you just run a (much smaller) wire between the two. Time consuming, but not difficult.
 
poops.jpg


I ended up getting it working though admittedly not very masterfully! Memory card no longer is saving so I probably missed a trace but everything else is in working order. I recently purchased a broken Genesis model 2 to practice trace repair on before I even think of touching the AES again. One day I'll go back to the AES and more gracefully patch it up. I'm just gonna enjoy this thing for a bit before I risk another fiasco. I intend to patch the trace up the more proper way and not jumper shenanigans, again, just gonna get some practice. Maybe cut up some hyperkin famiclone traces and patch them back up :p

To my credit, I did successfully recap this system and do an RGB bypass at the very least.

I do feel a bit embarrassed having all these familiar eyes on me, it's not a good first impression here to come in with some vintage console gore. I apologize for the harm I did to vintage tech and vow to right my wrongs in the future. Been very sleep-deprived from work and some rough insomnia biz. I'm just glad I got this thing patched up for now.

P.S. also got this baby hooked up to my Funai 27' crt from 2006, looks amazing to my eyes hooked up via HD Retrovision cables. I'm pretty satisfied but now the memory card is making me start to go crazy again... will resist the urge to poke until I improve my craft

crts.jpg
 
dweebenhemier said:
poops.jpg


I ended up getting it working though admittedly not very masterfully! Memory card no longer is saving so I probably missed a trace but everything else is in working order. I recently purchased a broken Genesis model 2 to practice trace repair on before I even think of touching the AES again. One day I'll go back to the AES and more gracefully patch it up. I'm just gonna enjoy this thing for a bit before I risk another fiasco. I intend to patch the trace up the more proper way and not jumper shenanigans, again, just gonna get some practice. Maybe cut up some hyperkin famiclone traces and patch them back up :p

To my credit, I did successfully recap this system and do an RGB bypass at the very least.

I do feel a bit embarrassed having all these familiar eyes on me, it's not a good first impression here to come in with some vintage console gore. I apologize for the harm I did to vintage tech and vow to right my wrongs in the future. Been very sleep-deprived from work and some rough insomnia biz. I'm just glad I got this thing patched up for now.

P.S. also got this baby hooked up to my Funai 27' crt from 2006, looks amazing to my eyes hooked up via HD Retrovision cables. I'm pretty satisfied but now the memory card is making me start to go crazy again... will resist the urge to poke until I improve my craft

crts.jpg
Click to expand...
Dude I think I speak on behalf of everyone, we here respect those who want take a challange and try hard.
This is the story of a life.... try to do, do damage, repair... now you have certainly learned many things. Don't stop!

Just remember flux next time :D
 
Successfully recapping it is impressive. I've seen more than one botched AES recap in forums over the years that broke something.
 
Quality flux goes heaps towards distributing heat so you protect the board.

I overflux most things. Not for soldering. To protect during rework and desoldering too.

One can always wash it off after with 99% ipa.
Not like there's a time crunch between clean and getting it back into service.
 
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