PC Engine Core Grafx II

Originally this was going to be a repair as it was sold as not working, but it turned out the included power supply had the wrong polarity. After cutting the plug off and soldering on a new one with the correct polarity it powered right up.

It doesn't stop there though, the system had a hole drilled in the side and a scart cable wired directly to the motherboard. Not only is this ugly it isn't very practical when you want to pack it away or move it. I forgot to take a before picture but here is one from the auction.

I never drill extra holes or add switches etc if I can avoid it because I think it looks ugly and like to keep things original looking as possible. However since there was already a hole drilled in the side and there's not really any neat way to fill it or cover it up, I decided to widen it slightly and fit a 8 pin mini din connector for the scart cable.

Now all I had to do was fit a mini din plug to the scart lead and fit a RGB amplifier pcb inside the system, the company that did the mod (Raven Games London) just soldered directly to RGB so the image was quite dark.

They also made the mistake of wiring the 5v pin to pin 16 instead of pin 8 and didn't have a resistor joining the two. This put the TV in RGB mode but didn't auto change the channel, a minor issue but worth it for the cost of a resistor.

They also only wired a single ground in the scart plug to audio ground, all the ground pins *should* be connected on the TV but this isn't always the case so after adding jumper wires to all the ground pins I fired it up and....

It looks great, if only I had a better game to play on it. :)