Thursday 3 October 2013

Virtual Boy

I wasn't planning on documenting this since it isn't that interesting but things have been very quiet when it comes to 'post worthy' stuff.

I picked up a Virtual Boy that was sold as not working because I wanted the cool rental case that came with it to store my loose system in. I thought it was going to be the usual faulty screen problem but after testing it I found it to be completely dead. I opened it up and one of the caps had exploded and the custom overly complex voltage regulator wasn't outputting 5v. Someone had clearly hooked up the wrong voltage / polarity power supply at some point. The custom voltage regulator was all surface mount parts and again overly complex so I did a google search for '7805 virtual boy' and sure enough it brought up this image.


I followed this schematic and added a small heatsink to the 7805 and the system fired right up. Sorry about the lack of pictures and being a bit vague on this one.