Pioneer LaserActive PAC-S10 Capacitor Replacement

   The 90's were a very interesting time in the world of video games - at least they were through my rose-colored glasses.  No one had a clear picture of where the future would take us but it seemed like everyone had a picture.  This gave rise to a ton of innovation that companies these days wouldn't dare risk trying.

   One such innovation was the Pioneer LaserActive.  Basically Pioneer worked with video game companies to create a Laser Disc player with a pluggable modules that contained entire video game consoles.  At $1000 for the LD player and $600 per module, it was a contender for the crown of fiscal masochism, easily beating already prohibitively expensive enthusiast-only platforms like the SNK Neo*GEO AES.

   Pioneer managed to get both Sega and NEC onboard, so LaserActive offered both a Genesis and Turbografx-16 module.  Not only did you get the world's most expensive working Genesis or Turbografx-16 inside your Laser Disc player, plus the functionality of the CD-ROM addons offered for both consoles, you also got access to an exclusive library of games released on Laser Disc.  All of the games tried to capitalize on the playback of full motion video (which was really the only reason to use the platform in the first place) and none of them were "killer apps", but they still fetch pretty high prices because most of them are still exclusive to this specific hardware platform.  

   That's right kiddies, playing LaserActive games on an emulator is pretty much not a thing.  This is mostly due to the analog nature of Laser Disc, but more specifically how some LaserActive games used it.  Games on Laser Disc aren't exclusive to the LaserActive platform - the original Dragon's Lair arcade machines used LDs, for example.  And many if not all of the old arcade LD games can and have been emulated - hell Dragon's Lair can be played on any standard DVD player.

   Because LD's aren't digital, they can't be "ripped" in the traditional sense. The material has to be "digitized" (i.e. played back and captured in a digital format like MPEG) in order to be used by an emulator.  But with LaserActive it's not a simple matter of digitizing the analog video and re-incorporating it into the program code.  In many cases, to speed up scene transformations multiple video streams were recorded on top of one another, taking advantage of the nature of analog interlacing.  Scenes were conditionally played back as odd or even scanlines by the LaserActive software.  In other words, if you played the raw video into a capture device you'd get an indecipherable visual mess.  It's theoretically possible to either "trick" the LaserActive device into playing the properly decoded scenes into a capture device, or building a special capture device capable of decoding the specific method used to encode the video, but all things being equal, it would be extremely difficult to simply "dump" a LaserActive game, and to date I'm unaware of anyone having devoted the time and energy to attempt it.

   A couple of years ago I was able to get one of these players at a pretty reasonable price on Ebay.  Mine came with the "PAC-S10" which is the Genesis/Sega CD module.  It played "Mega LD" titles, and Sega CD titles just fine, but wouldn't recognize games in the cart slot.  While I had never heard of this particular problem, it wasn't hard to guess what it was.  The electrolytic capacitors used in electronics in the 90's are hitting an age where their failure rate is spiking.  Even the ones that weren't cheaply made or defective have reached the end of their operational lifespan.

   Any electrical engineer who would like to chime in and correct me should feel free, but from what I've been able to glean capacitors work sort of like power reservoirs.  It's my understanding that this serves a couple of purposes - firstly to "rectify" power - that is keep the amount of power moving steadily between components even when the power given off by the power supply is fluctuating.  This is particularly important when dealing with integrated circuits and data processing because the difference between a 1 and a 0 is actually measured by differences in voltage.  It may be okay if starting your washing machine in the next room makes your lights dim a fraction, but it would not be okay if your computer started mistaking 1's for 0's because of it!  Capacitors determine the amount of power that gets delivered to things like audio and video amplifiers, drive motors etc...  When they start to go bad, meaning that they're no longer delivering power at a regular expected level, all sorts of weird things start to happen.

   Electrolytic capacitors actually contain liquid electrolyte (yes, what plants crave), which is corrosive and eventually either evaporates (if you're lucky) or leaks out all over the circuit board (if you're not lucky).  The failure is based solely on age.  New in box or rarely used consoles seem to fail at the same rate as old workhorses. These ticking time bombs are unfortunately super-common because they're cheap and manufacturers don't exactly care if they only last 30 years.

   The increasing failure curve of Electrolytic capacitors has brought this problem roaring into the consciousness of classic gaming culture because most of us old guys still gaming on 30+ year old consoles are going to be affected by it sooner rather than later.  Now the common remedy to this is to replace all of the electrolytic capacitors in a given console with newer and presumably higher quality electrolytic capacitors - hopefully getting at least another 30 years out of them before they start failing all over again.

   When I bought the LaserActive it was with the knowledge that the game modules were notorious for capacitor failure, so I wasn't exactly surprised to find out that my PAC-S10 wasn't completely functional.  In fact, alongside it, I acquired a nice soldering rework station against the day I would eventually have to replace the capacitors.

   Now, the idea of replacing all of these capacitors with more that would just fail again did not sit well with me.  Fortunately not all capacitors are electrolytic.  There are quite a few different compositions.  Ceramic polymer capacitors were pretty limited and expensive in the 90's but not so much nowadays.  But would these really be compatible?

   All capacitors are rated for capacitance (imagine that!), voltage and temperature.  In this sense one is as good as another irrespective of composition.  They do have different properties, however.  For example, my quest to determine if ceramic capacitors would be a compatible substitute led me down the rabbit hole of DC Voltage Bias.  There's also the fact that most of the ceramic capacitors I found were bipolar - that is to say that polarity does not matter.  Almost all of the electrolytic capacitors in the PAC-S10 were polarized.

   Firstly, bipolar capacitors are interchangeable with polar capacitors.  In fact, you can build a bi-polar capacitor by simply connecting opposing poles (anode and cathode) of two polar capacitors with the same capacitance rating.  So there is no problem replacing a polarized capacitor with a bi-polar capacitor.

   As for the DC Voltage Bias, that's a trickier subject to tackle.  The question is will the DC Voltage Bias property of the ceramic capacitors cause issues if they're used in place of the original electrolytic capacitors.  The answer is that it depends greatly on what the capacitor is meant for.  For example, audio circuits use capacitors to regulate the frequency of signals based on a constant capacitance value.  The higher DC Voltage Bias of a ceramic capacitor causes capacitance to fluctuate when voltage is higher and can actually degrade the quality of the audio signal by altering the signal outside the desired frequency.  I'm nowhere near skilled enough to tell which circuits on the board have to do with audio with any degree of reliability, so this is a bit of a problem.  The solution seems to be relying on the voltage rating of the capacitor itself.  The DC Voltage Bias is expressed as a curve - the variation of capacitance increases exponentially as you reach the capacitor's maximum voltage value.  If that maximum value is considerably higher than the voltage is ever likely to get, the frequency variation should remain inconsequential.  By selecting a ceramic capacitor of a higher voltage value (say, double) you can minimize fluctuation by keeping the DC Voltage Bias on the low end of the curve.

   Using these assumptions I decided to go ahead with the capacitor replacement using ceramic capacitors.  I found a list of capacitors on the system and ordered the replacements from Mouser.

  Having never worked with surface-mount components before there was a bit of a learning curve.  I had never used a hot-air workstation before so I had to browse around YouTube for some pointers and examples.  The basic idea is that you blow super-hot air onto the component and the heat passes through and under the component to melt the solder.  The fact that components survive being cooked like this was somewhat amazing, but evidently they're all expected to endure that level of heat for short periods of time.  After a little experimentation I was able to get an idea of how long I needed to hold heat to a SMD capacitor before it would come loose from the board.  Just hold on the component, wave it slightly to make sure the heat is applied evenly to both sides, nudge with the tweezers every couple of seconds until it moves then pluck it off and repeat.  After the better part of 100 capacitors I went after the board with a de-soldering braid to clear off any excess solder, then used alcohol and cotton swabs to scrub melted flux and what I assume was leaked electrolyte from the board.  There was a similar learning curve with installing the replacement capacitors.  By the time I got to the end, I had to re-do the first 10 or 15 to make them look nicer.

   Replacing 90-some odd capacitors is a lot of work - especially if you're learning as you go.  By the time I put the last one in, my concentration was a little frazzled, but I was really anxious to see the fruits of my labor.  I quickly and, I thought, carefully reassembled the PAC-S10, popped it into the LaserActive player, popped a cartridge in and turned it on.  I was delighted when the screen lit up and the game actually started playing from the cartridge - that part was fixed.  But then I noticed there was no sound and my heart sank as I checked and re-checked all of the audio cables and the receiver.  As I sat down to think through what might have gone wrong, I realized I had no memory of re-attaching the daughter board when I reassembled the PAC-S10.  I went back to my work area, and sure enough, the daughter board was still sitting there waiting patiently for me to figure out what had gone wrong.  With the unit _completely_ re-assembled the sound was back.  I played through about 3 stages of Lightning Force, 2 stages of The Terminator on Sega CD, and 2 stages of Hyperion on MegaLD before I was satisfied that everything was working.

   A couple of weeks later I was playing around with Laserdiscs and decided to pop in one of the Star Wars Definitive Edition discs and I noticed a low buzzing noise when the sound was turned up.  After poking around I noticed that the buzz went away when the Laserdisc was played with the PAC module ejected, so the buzz was definitely coming from it.  Problem is I didn't really do any before and after testing so I don't really have any way of knowing if this was a result of using ceramic capacitors, or if it was just poor shielding of the PAC module causing some minor noise.  No way I'm replacing all of the capacitors again to find out!

   

Zelda

The somber first note of the title theme plays
in my head every time I see this image.

Even after completing the main quests, I find myself being drawn back to Breath of the Wild.  This is most likely because the Switch is new and shiny and I haven't been limited by such a lack of options since I was a kid.  But I also have to admit that this is by far the most satisfying Zelda experience I've ever had.  Zelda has always been a mixed bag for me.

Nintendo in-store demo kiosk from the 80's.

As a kid I remember Zelda being an esteemed phenomenon.  Whenever my mother took me with her while she shopped at the Richman Gordman department store in Council Bluffs, Iowa, I would immediately head left from the entrance to the electronics counter where the Nintendo demo kiosk sat.  Most of the time there was already someone playing and a line of kids waiting for a turn.  The shiny metallic gold of the Zelda cartridge practically leaped out at the eyes. The first time I ever played the Legend of Zelda was on that demo kiosk.  Play time was limited to something like 5 minutes so I only ever got to see the opening and play for a couple of minutes before the game reset, but that hauntingly adventurous title theme soaked into my blood.

The actual Richman Gordman where I first played the Legend
of Zelda on a demo kiosk.  This photo is from it's Grand
Opening about 12 years beforehand.  It was vacated about
a decade ago, and torn down in the last year or so.

The game was always rented out whenever we went to the video store (I just realized how much of an anachronism "video store" has become.).  One of the teachers at school was a huge fan too.  There was a group of boys he would discuss the game with.  I usually sat at a distance and just listened to the conversation wondering what the actual experience must be like.  By the time I actually did get to rent the game and sit down for more than 5 minutes to play it, I was completely confused.  I wandered around aimlessly for about 30 minutes, stabbing stuff, dying and repeating.  At one point I found a dungeon, but never figured out how to solve it.  I didn't have any of the maps or guides or network of friends to ask for advice.  The game didn't do anything to explain itself, really.  After a while I grew frustrated and went off to go seek less demanding sources of fun.  Oddly, my failure to get anything out of it did very little to diminish the mystique - if anything Zelda became even more mythical in my mind as a result.

To a certain degree most of my experiences with Zelda have followed the same pattern.  When Zelda II came out, I rented it, stabbed around for an hour or two without really understanding what was going on, then shut it off and went outside with a bucket and my bike to go hunt for snakes.

Pre-production images from The Legend of Zelda:
A Link to the Past.  This was taken from a poster that
was widely distributed with new games.

When the new Zelda title was announced for the SNES and the first screenshots started to trickle out, I was instantly enraptured by it.  The leap in visual fidelity over the NES games brought the artistry close enough to the surface of reality to fuel my imagination and fill me with a sense of adventure I've seldom experienced since.  However, by the time A Link to the Past finally came out, life had intervened and I no longer had a SNES, or any video games of any kind.  It wasn't until about 1995 when someone gave me a SNES in lieu of repaying a debt that I actually started my collection as it is today.  By that point SNES games were plentiful and cheap and there were a dozen places to buy them from.  I went to a local shop called Comic City and bought a handful of SNES games - among them A Link to the Past.

A Link to the Past was every bit the experience I wanted it to be.  Adventurous music, the joy of discovery, and for the first time, the game had clearly defined objectives.  You were free to wander around in search of new secrets but the game had built-in maps, and objective markers. There was also a fortuneteller that functioned as a source of hints about how to progress the main story.  I didn't need a manual or a strategy guide to play or complete it.

After finishing LttP I hunted down a Super Gameboy ( a peripheral that allowed you to play Gameboy games on the SNES ) and a copy of Link's Awakening.  Link's Gameboy outing was a bit smaller in scope than LttP, but it was every bit as fun.  There was only one time I ended up stuck because the game assumed I had a manual and had read it. At that point, every Zelda game I had played had been used and none of them had come with manuals.  There's a particular dungeon with a locked room that can't be opened until you decipher the clue: "First, defeat the imprisoned Pols Voice, Last Stalfos."

The infuriating puzzle from Link's Awakening that I struggled with because I didn't have a manual.

After over 20 years I still remember that clue because I mulled it so long and so hard.  I actually called Nintendo and purchased a strategy guide for the game ( Nintendo Power - Nintendo's in-house magazine - had a perpetual promotion during the 90's where you would get a free official strategy guide for whatever game you liked whenever you subscribed or renewed your subscription - I renewed my subscription to get the guide.)  To my utter frustration the strategy guide also assumed I had a manual and infuriatingly just repeated the re-worded clue "Defeat the pols voice first then stafflos."  I ended up solving the puzzle randomly out of sheer perseverance.  It wasn't until the door finally unlocked and I began to analyze what I had done that I realized what I had been missing.  It was not at all clear to me before that "pols voice" was the name of the little rabbit-face enemies, and that stalfos were the skeletal enemies.  The trick was simply to kill the baddies in the correct order.

Ocarina of Time was the first Zelda game I actually got to participate in on day one.  Nintendo did more promotion for that game than I've seen before or since.  Every retailer had some kind of pre-order bonus, and I made it my goal to get as many as possible.  I ended up pre-ording the game at something like 5 different places (though I only bought one copy) - I even went so far as to drive 200 miles to Kansas City to hit a GameCrazy.  There were the usual posters and T-shirts, but also mini figures, stickers, hats, keychains, phone cards, and even a Trapper-Keeper-like binder.  I also managed to get an 8-foot-tall sword standee from Wal*Mart. On release day, I got a call from the manager at Electronics Boutique telling me that I better get there quickly because they did not receive enough stock to fill all pre-orders.  I told my boss that I had to take off work for a couple of hours to run an errand.  I tried very hard to let her get the wrong impression - like this was some kind of family emergency, but when she asked me directly I had to tell her.  She was normally pretty strict and I fully expected her to deny my request when I told her I was driving across town for a video game.  Evidently her grandson had been talking about the new Zelda non-stop so she let me go with a smile, and when I got back to work, she asked if she could look at the box and remarked how "neat" it was.  The rest of the day I had that shiny gold box sitting on my desk reminding me that I was not at home playing.

Pictures I took on November 21st 1998 showing off a good portion of my pre-order swag as well as magazines featuring Ocarina of Time on the cover and, of course, the rest of my Zelda collection at the time.

When I finally did get home, my wife and I both gathered around to watch the opening scenes together.  As awesome as it was playing a polygonal Zelda game for the first time, that familiar feeling of being lost set in.  The game attempted to explain itself, but stopped just short of telling you exactly what to do in a lot of circumstances.  I had manuals and strategy guides (at least two of them, in fact - I collected _everything_ OoT), but the experience was never as fun as LttP and I eventually put it down before completing it and moved on to other things.  It wasn't until 2015 when I finished setting up my retro gaming area that I pulled out my original OoT cart and completed the game.

Prior to Ocarina of Time, Zelda releases were rare and special events.  Nintendo was very careful and deliberate about every release and they took years to ensure they were great.  Between 1986 and 1998 (12 years), there had been a total of 5 Zelda releases.  There were another 5 Zelda titles released between 2000 and 2002.

The first of the rapid-fire Zelda releases was Majora's Mask which sought to re-use the game engine and assets from OoT but inject a bunch of new gameplay ideas to avoid just repeating the same convention.  Problem was I had never grown comfortable with the convention they sought to buck, so layering more complexity over top of it kind of turned me off to Majora's Mask.  I bought it, played it, and put it down.

Next up was Oracle of Seasons/Oracle of Ages.  After Pokemon's runaway success, there were a lot of other Gameboy releases that tried to mimic the convention of simultaneously releasing two nearly identical games with different content.  Oracle of Seasons/Ages provided two drastically different quests.  I bought these, but never really got into playing them.  They were developed out-of-house by Capcom, so I was a little leery but I think I was just experiencing Zelda overload at the time.

Although it is often cited as its own release, Four Swords was more of a mini-game that was attached to the Gameboy Advance remaster of A Link to the Past.  I was not at all interested in playing it because of the glut of shoehorned multiplayer going around at the time.

When Nintendo unveiled Wind Waker, I nearly declared the series dead.  All those years waiting for a photo-realistic Zelda experience, Nintendo finally produced hardware that could pull it off and instead they were going to give us an impressionistic cartoon.  My wife peeled me off the ceiling and asked if ANY Zelda game had ever turned out to be awful and I had to admit, that no, they hadn't.  I warmed to the idea and my enthusiasm grew so great that I ended up importing the Japanese version of the game.  Wind Waker turned out to be an amazing and magical experience that renewed my love for the series.  It brought back the music and discovery - the sense of exploration, and most importantly the game just seemed to click with the way I thought.  I was able to intuit where treasures would be and how to solve certain puzzles.  I finished the game in Japanese before the U.S. version was released.

The Minish Cap was the first original Zelda title to come out for the Gameboy Advance.  It's art style was more cartoonish than previous titles, but not quite the same as Wind Waker.  I remember it being a fun game, but I found the gimmick of a hat that shrunk Link to be uninteresting and never really finished it.

Twilight Princess came at a really odd time.  It was developed for the Gamecube but ported to the Wii as a launch title.  It was simultaneously released for both consoles with the Wii version incorporating motion controls. Up until this point Link was generally left-handed and the environments were apparently designed with his left-handedness in mind.  Since the overwhelming majority of players would be using the Wii motion controls with a dominant right-hand, they made Link right-handed in the Wii version of Twilight Princess.  This also caused them to horizontally flip the entire game.

I remember waiting in line in front of Best Buy all night long in the freezing cold the day before the Wii launch.  I read half of Eragon shuddering under a blanket.  I was the second or third in line when the store opened.  Grabbed up my Wii, copy of Twilight Princess, and Red Steel, a Pro Controller, extra Wii-mote and Nunchuck and headed home to connect the system, play for 10 minutes and collapse from exhaustion.  Twilight Princess was a pretty game - the more realistic Zelda game everyone had been clamoring for, but it failed to really capture my imagination.  We were back to a system that felt unintuitive to me and I was often wandering around lost.  After playing the game for about 10 hours or so, I put it down and didn't touch it for years.  I did eventually finish it about 5 years after it came out.

When the Phantom Hourglass came out for the DS, I was pretty excited when I saw it shared its art style with Wind Waker.  What could be better than Wind Waker on my DS?  Come to find out, in a bid to force players to use a new control scheme, Nintendo had done away with traditional D-Pad movement and required players to move Link around the environment with a stylus.  This meant that I had to block my view of the action to move Link around.  After 5 minutes I quit out of disgust and never touched it again. If I wanted to use a stylus I'd play games on a PDA. Such a waste.

The next game in the series - Spirit Tracks - was also sacrificed to the stylus gimmick.  I bought a copy out of a bargain bin for $5 to keep my collection complete, but have never played it.

Skyward Sword was a game that felt like it was crippled by out-of-date hardware and gimmicky control schemes.  While not as egregious as the Phantom Hourglass's forced stylus control, it was nevertheless annoying. The game was designed to use the new Wii Motion Plus - which was basically an iterative improvement in accuracy for the Wii Remote.  The player would swing the controller like a sword hilt to attack, or to activate special actions.  It worked well enough, but it was tiring and eventually got in the way of the gameplay.  But probably the most disappointing aspect of Skyward Sword was the fact that it was released for the Wii.  The Wii launched in 2006 during the transition to HDTV, and to keep costs low Nintendo chose hardware that was locked to a comparatively low resolution ( 480p ).  This wasn't such a big deal at the beginning of the Wii's lifespan, but 5 years later the Wii's graphics were downright ugly on contemporary TVs, so the artistry and beauty of the game was forever marred by low resolution graphics.  I can't bring myself to try to finish this game in that state - hopefully it will be redeemed with an HD remaster some day.

Click on the image to see the full effect.  This side-by-side was taken using an emulator.
Both images are of the exact same game code and textures, but on the left you see what the game
 looks like trapped behind the Wii's low resolution 480p output and on the right you see 
what's possible when the unaltered game is simply rendered in a modern HD resolution. 

The Wii U was the first console Nintendo released with the capability of rendering in HD (720p/1080p).  The console was home to HD remakes of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, which brought a similar graphical improvement to the images of Skyward Sword above.

Breath of the Wild is, by far, the largest departure from the basic Zelda formula.  It more closely resembles western-developed RPGs like the Elder Scrolls, Assassin's Creed, or Far Cry.  It uses the same basic method of quest organization and branching, the same method of mapping ( including map progression ).  It uses the same core control scheme as every third person game released in the last decade - no forced experimentation.  Yet despite all this it manages to retain the soul of a Zelda game with massive amounts of exploration and discovery, skill and tool-based progression, and clever puzzles and secrets.