I’ve worked on a ton of AES over the years and I’m starting to see service requests for them pick up again about halfway through the year! This one came in simply for a recap job initially but in talking with customer we decided to do an RGB bypass as well.
While 3-6 revisions are easily the worst stock RGB output, 3-5 often have quite noticeable jailbars and I always capture before footage on the RetroTink to confirm. In this case, there was pretty significant evidence of them especially in large solid-colored backgrounds so we both agreed a bypass was worth it!
Performing the bypass also makes a lot of sense while a recap is happening since you have to remove 4 of the 470uF caps to do so, and when paired together it saves you reinstalling those 4 caps. So started with the decap first and then cleaned all the dirt and debris off the board and inside the cart slot (which tends to accumulate quite a bit) and gave a nice clean to the headphone slider which also seems to attract grime and can affect audio out from stereo port so worth doing while its open!
With the board fully cleaned, I installed a brand new 3-5 cap kit from Console5, omitting the aforementioned caps near AV out to save room for the NeoPass install. Next step was to remove the 7 resistors which are in the way of the castellated joints on the NeoPass PCB, before placing the board and carefully aligning so it would make a nice clean connection to each of those now empty 7 pads on the mainboard.
Once I had 2 points tacked in and verified alignment looked good, added flux and soldered all 7 points. During this phase I also apply Kapton tape to the rear of the board so as the via fills it doesn’t blob or protrude out the bottom too far. Once all the joints looked good, I cleaned up all the unspent flux and then connected a 28AWG wire to the SI pad (Sync In) and then routed that through an empty cap leg hole and to pin 11 of the CXA encoder chip. NeoPass install done!
With both primary tasks complete, I left top shell off but assembled board inside the bottom shell and hooked up to test. Image looked great, stereo audio sounded perfect so knowing operation was good I signed off on the JRG sticker and closed up the shell. This also allowed me to apply 4 brand new premium rubber feet from Console5 which helps the console grip and covers 3 of the 4 screw holes.
Got it hooked up to the RetroTink to get some post-bypass captures and the results as always were a huge improvement (see them here – https://x.com/RetroJeff83/status/2071591146841629071?s=20 )
I then captured footage in 4K for the below shots to share the results and let it run for a while on the bench. All looked good so applied light coat of UV protectant and it’s getting boxed up and ready to ship home… Another order halfway done!
