Turbo Express Get!

I am a veteran of the console wars that raged through the late 80's and early 90's. At school the Nintendo and Sega fanboys would have such heated discussions that it would sometimes actually come to blows. I was a staunch defender of Mario and his ilk, and I could quote the NES and SNES specs by heart. The SNES color pallet blew the Genesis out of the water - who cares if the Genesis is fast if it's ugly...okay, I better change the subject. (Man, that's easy to slip back into!) So in the midst of the chaos came a relatively unknown. The Turbografx-16.

Like a stranger from out of town come to upset the balance between the two dominant gangs, the Turbografx looked almost as good as the SNES and moved almost as fast as the Genesis. But perhaps the thing that most set it apart was its penchant for paradigm challenging. Two things in particular stuck out in my mind. Firstly the system was the first to market with a CD-ROM add on - if it had not been so prohibitively expensive, that alone might have cemented victory for NEC's little contender. But the other thing that really stuck out was the Turbo Express - a handheld system from NEC that actually played the same games as the home console. Both of these revolutionary ideas were mimmicked by Sega later on, but NEC set the precedent.

I have had a Turbo Duo for some years now - I managed to score a brand new one from TZD.com before they closed up shop. But I never could bring myself to spend the cash on a Turbo Express unit. Despite being nearly 20 years old, the little handheld console never really dropped in market value. It was one of those rare items that went from being expensive because it was new and hot directly to being expensive because it was collectable.

I have been a member of PCEngineFX.com off and on for the last few years. As a former member of the now defunct R.I.G.G. I found them to be an invaluable resource for Turbografx/PC Engine fans. So when I saw a practically brand new Turbo Express on Ebay going for practically nothing because the video had failed, I stopped by PCEngineFX.com and sure enough found a repair guide for it. I bought the Turbo Express from Ebay and a $1 capacitor from Radio Shack and when it arrived, I went to work.

Things didn't turn out perfectly however. The capacitor that had to be removed was a "surface mount" capacitor, and it was very difficult to weaken the connections.

(This image is magnified about 8x)

The advice I read was to gently twist the capacitor with a pair of pliers. Well, gentle as I was, I still managed to lift the negative trace right off the board.

(Without the little solder pad there was nothing to connect the negative leg of the cap to...)

You'll probably notice the scratch marks where the negative trace should go. The printed circuit boards (PCB) in these NEC systems are multi-layer so i was digging in desperate hopes of finding the rest of the trace buried somewhere under the pad I had lifted off with the capacitor. It took me a while to notice the little trace that had lifted just adjacent to it because it was so small. It looked like a sliver of paint to me (you have to remember these photos are magnified a bit.) The trace went straight to the leg of the little transistor/MOSFET. That was what I needed to find an alternate soldering point.

(The negative lead is connected to the alternate soldering point)

I decide to "remote mount" the capacitor because the legs of the capacitor were stiffer than a couple of thin wires and the connection was extremely fragile - I didn't want to do a lot of twisting and adjusting after the leads were attached.

(Here is a greatly magnified view of the alternate solder point)

So, while the experience was harrowing, I was fully rewarded when I popped in Bonk's Adventure and the game screen displayed normally on the formerly blank console. It was worth the fun, though repairing these things probably isn't for everybody.