Full Recap of my Sega Game Gear (20 Capacitors)

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I love the Sega Game Gear and have a pretty decent collection of systems and games. The only problem? None of the systems actually work! I have 3 Game Gear systems all in decent cosmetic condition and yet all 3 of them have different issues that cause them to be completely unusable. I've run into even more systems over the years that also didn't work for one reason or another. Systems that won't power on (or power on and immediately shut off), have flickering screens and extremely low volume levels are all common issues. These Game Gears are notorious for bad capacitors and pretty much all of them today need to be completely recapped! This is not to say there aren't other issues to be expected on this now 30 year old hardware. There may very well be other problems with your Game Gear other than just capacitors but in general this is the main issue with most of them out there these days.

There are 20 capacitors in my Game Gear that all need to be replaced. Again the capacitors in these Game Gear systems are known to be of bad quality (not all 30 year old electronics should be expected to have bad capacitors just due to their age) and just out of curiosity 6 random capacitors were tested on an ESR tester and 5 out of the 6 tested bad! This pushed my limited soldering skills to the limit as most of the capacitors are surface mount, not through hole and using larger electrolytic capacitors will require some thought into placement and layout to get them all to fit inside the limited space where the smaller aluminum capacitors were. You may require a finer iron tip that what many cheaper soldering irons come with to get to the sides of the surface mount capacitors and some of the caps were frighteningly close to delicate inductor coils and transformers. Try not to accidentally touch any of those other nearby components. I managed to hit one of the connectors on the audio board and mangle the plastic clip around the pins but it wasn't bad enough that I couldn't force the connector back onto it. I had a bench power supply set to 9v DC and clipped the leads directly to the power supply board. This made testing super easy as I would test the system after changing a few capacitors at a time to make sure I didn't make anything worse as I went.

There's no guarantee that changing the capacitors will fix all Game Gears as I mentioned there are other issues that could be at fault. But in my case it returned this Game Gear to perfect like new working condition. Sure the 30 year old LCD hasn't changed and it's still the same low contrast, passive motion blurry mess as it always was BUT the system turns on, brightness adjustment works through the full range and the volume is as loud as ever! Replacement LCD upgrades are available and a fully recapped system like this would make a great candidate for an LCD screen upgrade BUT those upgrade kits cost apx $100-160 USD depending on the kit and most of them require a moderate level of modification to get working. This was already pushing my soldering skills to new levels so those LCD screen mods are probably still a little out of my realm of comfort! There are also LED back-light mods that replace the high voltage CCFL tube as a back-light source with modern efficient LED's. This doesn't improve the image quality but rather improves the battery life substantially (doubles the runtime!) but as with all screen related mods extreme care is required to not damage the fragile LCD screen and ribbon connectors.

Overall I couldn't be happier with the results. I haven't had a Game Gear system that worked this well in 15+ years! I also have to say it's a lot nicer to play these systems now that we have decent rechargeable batteries (like the Panasonic/Sanyo Eneloop) at our disposal! Maybe the Game Gear would have been even more popular in the early 90's if we had batteries like these back then!