It’s been a little while since I had a NeoGeo AES come into the shop but its always a pleasant surprise! Not always the most fun to work on but always an honor. The issue with these typically is the plated vias and traces are quite fragile compared to a lot of other boards so heat on the Hakko gun needst to be dialed to its lowest and more care/precision taken than the average console. Never mind the fact that one of these would be VERY expensive to replace if something happened
Anyways, since they selected the Full Service Cleaning I did a full teardown first, put the shell in to soak while I started on the decap process!
All cap joints were reflowed first to ensure clean removal, then wiped board down thoroughly and dusted out the cart slot. This customer had also requested an RGB Bypass in which case I still have spare NeoPass kits on hand which is my preferred way to handle this now. Very nice and clean and fast! The benefit of this combination is that regardless of which revision AES you have, some capacitors will NOT be reinstalled so its easiest to do the decap first, clean, then break to install the RGB bypass BEFORE installing new caps
After removing 6 resistors and flooding those 6 points with fresh solder I quickly soldered QSB into place and ran the sync wire to the encoder chip. Once everything looked good I installed all the new caps from Console5 except the aforementioned 470uF caps (x4) near the AV out DIN
Once the recap/bypass process was done it was time to scrub the shell and rinse and set to dry overnight! This shell was in overall nice shape, the usual age related scuffs and scratches but no cracks and the NeoGeo gold logo was quite intact which is becoming rare these days!
Once the shell was dry installed the mainboard into the bottom shell but left top off, then tested and once operation was confirmed I gave my stamp of approval and closed it up. Customer had provided some premium rubber feet from RetroFrog so got those put into place, and then applied UV protectant coat to shell.
Let it run on attract mode of a few games for a while and then played 4 of my favorites (seen below) to get some 4K captures. The difference in image quality is massive. Check out the above two photos of the before and after. These 3-6 revision AES have awful jailbars that get completely eliminated with a mod like this and when paired with a good cable and scaler looks absolutely picture perfect!
Another order in the books 💪
