It is finished! I am thoroughly glad with how this project turned out. I wasn’t sure If I would be able to resurrect my Game Gear from the grips of death, but I am pleased to announce that it is currently back up and running like a champ. I will do a quick recap (that very well could be a pun here in a second). Many electronics at the time of the release of the Game Gear had some poor capacitors in them. They would often break and leak electrolytic fluid. This fluid tends to corrode traces on the board. This happens not only on the main board, but also on the audio board. What is the solution to fixing this you ask?
Here is an example of some corroded point. If you see the nasty stuff next to the 22 microfarad cap. All of this needed to be scrapped off and cleaned to create a good solder point. Kind of a pain.
This is what it looks like with the new caps in place and the corrosion cleaned off to the best of my ability.
I replaced all the caps on the board. ALl the blue cylinder things are the new ones. 11 in total. There was probably 3 or 4 leaky ones, but it was a good idea to just replace them all.
WOOO! Go get’em Sonic. The small board in the upper left is the audio board before I replaced the caps.
This board was surprisingly worse than the main board. It was extremely corroded. Almost all the caps were leaking, too.
This is the Game Gear all back together. Everything works again including the audio.
Ditto.
These are all the bad, old caps that were replaced.
The aftermath.
I am very happy with how this turned out and it gives me more confidence to do this kind of stuff in the future so watch for more projects of this nature.