Modding the Sega Game Gear with McWill Screen, New Caps

The classic gaming industry seems to be enjoying the same explosion of popularity as the revitalized vinyl album market. With various catalysts such the low cost of production for small, single-board computer systems and the proliferation of cheap LCD panels, we've seen many interesting solutions hit the market in the past couple of years. Some of my favorites have been the NES and SNES Classic, the SNK Mini, the C64 Mini. Many fun new home-brew options are also now available such as 3D printed cases wrapped around Raspberry Pi boards housing thousands of classic games. Technology these days is incredible.

An example of a mini console with Raspberry Pi inside

One of the things about emulation is sometimes a game works well, and sometimes it can run a little funky. Situations like this can leave you yearning for that original hardware… back when times were simple and you could slap a big plastic cartridge in an over sized toaster-like device and everything worked perfectly. You might even dust off your old systems to see how they've held up over the decades. That’s when you realize hmmn… some have not aged as well as others.

If you showed any youngster a Sega Game Gear today, they’d think it was a piece of junk, and I suppose they’d be half right. I was a huge fan of the Sega Game Gear back in the day, and for days when you’re getting shuttled around in the family van, it was like living in the lap of luxury. Having a color screen on the go was revolutionary, and you had to save your allowance for quite a long time to get not only the Game Gear, but a $50 rechargeable battery pack to boot.

The jumbo-sized Game Gear PowerBack

Why was the battery pack necessary? That puppy would eat six AA batteries in four hours flat. It was as inefficient on juice as a Hummer is on gas. Much of that was being drawn from the 160x144 pixel color screen with back-light. Compared to LCD screens today, the screen looked like someone took several layers of Saran wrap and window tint and covered it up. Everything is faded looking and slightly blurry… and this is even on the newer, better Majesco screens.

As you can see, he doesn't like it very much

Not only is the screen lackluster by today’s standards, but the capacitors in the unit are also ready to give up the ghost. Capacitors are little tubular parts that store energy in a circuit, you’ll find plenty of them from the earliest circuits in existence to your cell phone today. Electrolytic capacitors tend to be one of the first things to die in old electronics. These are typically the first items to be replaced in most older electronics which are being refurbished, such as popular amplifiers from the 1960s. The Game Gear caps are getting to be three decades old, so they’re on the way out if they haven’t started leaking already. It doesn't help that caps during this time were especially poor quality either. If you're curious about capacitor degradation, Quora has a nice article about it.   

The innards of a typical capacitor

So what is one left to do with a poor old Game Gear that no one loves anymore? Fortunately, you have options. Many sellers on eBay will sell you a batch of capacitors to replace all the caps in your system for $5-10. They come with directions too. If you’re handy with an iron, this is a pretty easy task and will take 1-2 hours to replace them on all three internal boards (the power board and sound board are mounted separately). At the end of the day though, you’re still stuck with that crappy screen.

An example of a Game Gear Capacitor Kit from eBay seller GeekTronics

Fortunately, a gent named McWill offers a mod so that you can install a fresh new LCD screen in your game gear. It’s not a cheap mod, $120 as of this writing, but given the niche market for something like this, it seems reasonable. It also comes with a VGA output, so that’s a value-add right there. The difference of this screen is amazing… bright and crisp. Night and day compared with the old screen, and the new screen uses much less power to boot. So where’s the fly in the ointment?

McWill Game Gear mod available from Console5.com

I’m a hobbyist and I like to tinker with things and enjoy soldering PCBs with through holes parts. This, however, is not a fun mod… it’s more like work. There are minuscule SMD resistors which need to be moved/bridged and soldered to, and there are very small traces underneath, which if damaged would be difficult to find a trace on the board to fix… you’d be digging around for a schematic, and I don’t know if one is out there for the Game Gear… especially since there were 5-6 versions over the years.

My suggestion: unless you are very confident with your solder skills, I recommend you have someone else handle this mod for you. Your first time through will likely take 5-6 hours if you like to check your work, and the prices people charge on eBay for the install are a bargain (assuming they do good work, I can’t vouch for that).  

While you're in there (or someone else is), another nice cheap upgrade is replacing the stock plastic screen with a new glass one. They can be found on ebay for around $7 and offer make the image even clearer. They are flat though, compared to the bulbous plastic screens, so they change the look of the game gear slightly. The glass screens can also be installed without opening the game gear, but it is a bear to get it off and you can damage the surrounding plastic. 

On another Game Gear, I tried using the typical plastic tools to get under the lip without success. I ended up epoxying a wooden dowel to the screen which I slowly leveraged up to get the plastic screen separated from the unit. 

Below you can get a looksie at the internal mod on a Magic Knight Rayearth red Game Gear using 24-gauge silver plated copper in PTFE hookup wire.

Adjusting the white balance so you can see the screen quality better

Given the McWill Atari Lynx installation is quite similar, I wanted to include photos of that as well:

I hope you enjoyed the write-up. Please keep those wonderful handheld systems alive! 

The Retro Evercade Console is Here!

I've been waiting for the Evercade for quite a while and it's FINALLY here! 

It's pretty darn close to what I expected. The Evercade is a value-oriented product, so there are a number of compromises necessary to hit that low-cost sweet-spot. What really matters though is if it scratches that nostalgic itch and does a decent job of presenting the games, especially to those who may have never played them before. Get a low-down below of where Evercade really hits the mark and where it falls a little short:

The Evercade console in white

What's great:

• Huge selection of cartridges right out the door (10 available, 4 coming in Q3)
• The console has a decent weight to it and the build quality is solid. There’s no quality concerns like with generic consoles from China like the SupaBoy (e.g. hair or dirt behind screen, smudges in finish, etc.)
• The buttons have a great feel and response. The response similar to an Xbox controller, which is high praise.
• The L+R buttons have a little less weight but make a satisfying clicky sound
• The cartridges are a good size, maybe around the size of a Game Gear game (not tiny and easy to lose like the Switch)
• Easy-to-access menu during gameplay
• Nice looking, quality boxes for the cartridges and color manuals
• Rechargeable battery
• HDMI output
• Low priced games and system. The system is about $100 with three cartridges, and the cartridges are $20 each. The system with all ten games is $200.

Love the cartridge cases!

What could be better:

• Cartridge fit is fairly tight… not on the contacts, but the left and right sides are lacking adequate clearance.
• D-pad feels a little mushy, about what you’d expect from a 3^rd party value controller
• Screen angle viewing isn’t great, but you’re going to be head on playing this thing so not a big deal
• Screen could be a little larger
• There seems to be only one save state per cartridge, vs. one per game
• Sound quality isn’t the greatest. Granted these are 8 and 16 bit tunes, but they can still sound better with a little more wattage and a larger driver.
• A number of the games are two-player, but I don’t think there’s a way to link up two of these puppies.

 

That cartridge fit is tight!

Overall I think the Evercade is a really nice gesture to the retro gaming community. It’s a solid product with a price-point that’s accessible to many and already has great support from developers. The whole premise reminds me a bit of the NEO GEO X Gold, which was a nostalgic system released mostly for collectors where games were sold separately via cartridge. While I love SNK and the Neo Geo, I think the Evercade has more going for it than the X Gold with access to a variety of publishers. 

The real litmus test is in the games, and Evercade already has 10 titles available at launch (very impressive) and 4 more which will be releasing in Q3. Not only are there classic games, but new titles like Xeno Crisis and Tanglewood are being released. I’d really like to see it succeed so we can have even more newly released games and more classic collections to check out. I think the unit’s success in the market will be dependent on gaining more buy-in from devs so there are more carts available to consumers.

The storage case is a nice option

What could Evercade do to make a very solid release even better?

• Allow a save state for each game and enable two player via a firmware update.
• Offer a premium stand-alone console later down the line that addresses the compromises (screen, d-pad, speakers, maybe include a bigger battery) and sell for $199-$249. Collectors aren’t as price sensitive as normal consumers.

 

Currently available cartridges

• Atari Collection 1 (with 20 games)
• Namco Museum 1 (with 11 games)
• Data East Collection 1 (with 10 games)
• Interplay Collection 1 (with 6 games) 
• Atari Collection 2 (with 20 games)
• Namco Museum 2 (with 11 games)
• Interplay Collection 2 (with 6 games)
• Mega Cat Studios Collection 1 (with 10 games)
• Piko Interactive Collection 1 (with 20 games)
• Technos Collection 1 (with 8 games)

 

SupaBoy SFC Super Nintendo Emulator Review

The SupaBoy SFC is one strange customer. We’ve seen a number of DIYers hack desktop videogame consoles to work on the go, but it’s typically for the novelty or the challenge. Hyperkin’s SupaBoy takes the familiar brightly colored Super Nintendo controller and adds about a pound of extras, including a 4.3” LCD screen, speakers, two controller ports, a cartridge slot, rechargeable battery and a variety of buttons. The additions aren’t quite svelte or seamless as the ergonomics are a little awkward, but it does have the look of a finished product.

The SupaBoy plays as the Pied Piper, whistling sweet tunes to nostalgic gamers (probably in their late 20s to early 40s) who still hold a place in their heart for the Super Nintendo and have held on to a few cartridges. Drawing you in are the insanely low price ($65 at various retailers as of this writing) and the promise of simple access to your SNES library without having to pull your console out of the closet and fiddle with the connectors.

Once you get the console in your hands, the first oddity is the cartridge sticking up above the unit when seated, quite unusual if you are used to the flush fitting Gameboy cartridges. Wrapping your hands around the console gives you an idea of its girth. It’s slightly unnatural feeling, but you can get used to it. Some may be bothered by the weight, but at just under a pound it’s not bad.

There’s a lot to like: the screen is nice and colorful, you can adjust the brightness, there’s a 4:3 mode, the battery is rechargeable and user-replaceable, it charges off of a standard 5V USB cable, the controls feel solid, the cartridge slot has a flip up dust protector, and there’s a headphone output. I was also surprised that given this is a hardware emulator, it was compatible with every game I tried.

One of the items that falls into the could-be-better territory includes the cartridge seating. I found I had to seat and reseat a number of cartridges to get them to start. Another bugger is the quality control. The first unit I received had a fingerprint smudge behind the screen. The second had a little bit of dust, which I can live with. Given those obvious flaws, there may be other issues lying inside, but I have not cracked the unit open to assess. On several reviews, I noticed some users suffered from having their saves deleted by the console.

Compared to a similar offering that plays 8-bit Nintendo games, the 8-Bit Boy, the SupaBoy SFC doesn’t have the same quality feel and screen crispness. The 8-Bit Boy runs $99, and includes a pair of controllers and AC Adapter, while the SupaBoy does not, so it’s a relatively fair comparison.

I think what Hyperkin could learn from the U.S. Market is that video game enthusiasts in the ~20-40 age bracket would likely spare more than $65 for a better product… or at least a little more for better QC. Given the popularity of the $185 AVS system, the $189 Analogue Super Nt / Sega Sg, and the upcoming Polymega, there’s a market for more premium gear that plays vintage games.

Ultimately, the SupaBoy SFC is a good product that makes sense to use in the house or take with you to a friend’s house with a couple of games but is a bit to large for most people to use portably. Due to the saving issues and limitations of emulation, it’s probably not a complete replacement for a SNES console for most people. At least for $65 it’s a great novelty and will let you hop into some of your favorite old games without much fuss.