Gadgetory

today we're doing something a bit different this is a device that I saw when we were in Japan and I really wanted to buy it when we were there but I held off and bought it well just recently so this is a high Perkin Superboy SFC and it's a portable handheld console for SNES cartridges it's a bit of a legal side skirt because since you're using the original cartridge they're not selling it with any games pre included no roms anything like that I think it gets past Nintendo's legal department but we're gonna take it apart today see what's underneath and also remove the dust that came pre-installed under the LCD so that's part of what we're doing and then we might look at this later from a benchmark if we can figure out how to do it I don't know but let's take it apart and see see what's really in here to play these old Super Nintendo games before that this video is brought to you by us and the gamers access store you can go to store documents access net to pick up one of our ceramic mugs critically-acclaimed mod mats or educational video card tear down and PCB anatomy posters that teach the names and placements of all the key PCB components learn more at store des cameras XS net or click the link below so this is it this is the hyper consumer boy SFC as you can see it's got primal rage socketed right now and that's just an SNES cartridge the cartridge up there we actually have four other reasons for this we have the original SNES here next to me and if you look down let's look down into the pin out down there it's obviously the same thing because the cartridge does fit pins are different color but that doesn't matter so this handheld version is taking what was originally in here and just making it a bit more portable though it's pretty large portable and this is a somewhat legitimate way to play your SNES games without going the emulator route now it does also here's the dust particles I was talking about there's also include those annoyingly so we're gonna try and get in there and maybe remove those I don't know but this is something I've wanted since we went to Japan so bought it finally and we're just gonna take it apart and see what it looks like underneath I guess walk through the outside you can plug in the original controllers right here so there's your controller input stand it up like that if you want a terrible viewing angle experience to play it without actually being handheld and just for perspective speaking of viewing angles if you're at the angle of about the camera right now we would need this to be almost dead on for you to see any gameplay otherwise any other angle it's it's pretty much blacked out for the rest you've got your X a Y B you have start select d-pad over here and then the controller inputs and for the bottom this toggles bright or increases brightness one tick at a time I think it has about four ticks in it you can also push in to hold it to switch between 4x3 or 16x9 sixteen by nine doesn't want one scale or anything it stretches but if you wanted to fill the whole screen you could do that and then it's also got a volume dial headphone jack and there's AV out in the top on off with the the battery for this it's lithium ion so it is rechargeable and and then I think they advertise nine hours I haven't validated that but they advertise nine hours of gameplay on one charge reset switch pal or NTSC mode if you want to ruin your experience you get a pal or if you just have the European versions of the game releases then you could do that and then power and DC and I think that's all the buttons other than the L&R so let's take it apart bottom side this is probably a battery cage I would assume but let's see so there's our battery try and keep this all in order so I know how it goes back together and this we we want to disconnect this as soon as we can to reduce chance of damaging anything else because if it's getting any standby power which it probably is while we're messing around with the rest and poking out things with screwdrivers then it could short something so let's try and figure out how to safely disconnect this early in the process okay call as a foam pad I would say for vibration damping but there should be no vibration at all and then there's just a two pin power cable here and that just plugs in internally right in there so pretty straightforward you know what I didn't mention the price on this and I should do that before we take it apart more I think it was about ninety bucks which honestly isn't that bad we're gonna potentially review this more in the future if there's enough interest in it let us know if you want to see a full review or benchmark or anything we'll try and figure it out but only if there's interest in that but anyway about ninety bucks so there's a battery battery spec is from dong-gwon I've been there it is 3.7 volts 4400 milliamp hours and that's all that's all that's listed for specs so battery if you want the build service I'm working on you can get it on stored I cameras Nexus dotnet currently backordered because you all keep buying it which we appreciate is it that simple starting to get separation make sure firmly in the off position how do I separate the top ah more screws two more screws up here that I didn't see oh okay instantly separates so it's probably some cables plugged in yes okay buttons are coming out there is right and left like those in a moment that cable soldered okay alright so when you first take it apart if you ever do you would be greeted with these wires that are soldered straight to the PCB it's got to be really careful with those those rip out if we're not careful got a disconnected up here on this ribbon cable so let's let's disconnect the power wire first that's gonna be the black and the red all the power should be drained at this point but we're just gonna take care of anything related to power to minimize risk of damaging devices also it's the shortest and the most fragile cable so okay and then this one trick with these is to lift that latch so you just lift up the latch and there goes alright so what we have that's that's the one that's the most fragile so be careful that you see this cable got like I don't know if that's intentional or not it's just smashed so that black that ground right there it's just completely smashed on top of this support this sort of Plus shaped support I'm thinking this is maybe supposed to be down there but I mean it's oh that does not look good at all actually look at how a little thickness there is left to that it's like smashed down to just the copper wire inside of it this is maybe a bit of a quality control concerned they should probably push this down along with the red which is either 5 volt or 12 volt probably let's see can't tell what it is so that's pretty smashed not too happy about that I don't know when I rebuild that I'm gonna shove it down there and just make sure it stays down there so there's our buttons from the top they're situated just against a basic switch right here it looks similar to kind of those Omron switches that are prevalent all over the world a dip switch here led wired indirectly I will say it's probably pretty cool to work on a project like this as the engineers so for the modules on here SMDs they are labeled TC t 925 TC t 978 TC t 976 they have some some probe hookups right here if you wanted to connect the multimeter so battery ground so forth I'm guessing the most common point of failure and this is going to be these cables these ones that are soldered in there if it gets knocked around enough those old most probably break what's holding us in this appears to be holding us in a bit it's plugged into a small there's a daughter board in there under the motherboard so I'm trying to be careful to not break that and that is for the oh it's for the cartridge okay how are we connected connected to this white cable which looks like it feeds the controllers is this easily disconnected oh and not just that actually it's not not just the controllers that we're talking about it's the data feed for the cartridge - yeah so just daughter board for the cartridge and court reader and I think that's really all there is to that side of this there on version 3 though apparently their PCB let's take a look at the screen side and I'll just see if I can remove the dust from there there's the rotary dial for the volume this is all passively cooled it's really not much in here that creates any heat so there's no there's not even a heatsink on anything but probably the hottest thing in here is going to be the screen and that's that's sinking just into the PCB which is all copper and fiberglass anyway so that's kind of a natural heatsink another thing to be careful of here is these two wires are also soldered directly to the PCB and they're hooked up to a circuit board that's hooked up to the left and right buttons that's what we're looking out there I think yes and that looks like that's a carbon contact button so you can see this right here so we have button depresses and you get contact from the pad to the pad on the circuit board and then your signal travels into the PCB underneath so we just need to be careful about this this goes over here about removing this to not rip those out so what's holding they just pop it up maybe yes okay cool as well speakers our speaker wires are soldered in to the board directly okay so that's out so now we're just connected to a ribbon cable what you're not gonna be able to see too well but that that one right there this is what's stopping us at this point eggs there we go okay it is hinged it's trying to wonder if it was just pressure fit but nope it was hinged okay how did all of this go in so here's our screen hooked up with the ribbon cable all right cool that was just kind of notched into place and there's her piece of dust so now I can fix it how that was on the inside of the device okay cool so I'll fix that it's gonna get more dust on it while I'm working on it so I'll fix that at the end once when i reassemble off camera but there's your display it's pretty good display honestly like in terms of just quality for what your your plane like the benefit of this is it's a small device and it's playing ancient games that were low resolution so it works out pretty well for that but we will I'll I'll remove the dust at the end after we're done with this so that's the bottom part and what I took apart was I took the speakers out of the sockets all the buttons fell out when I flipped it what we wanted and then we're left with this piece here where you see the speaker's right there so it's got a rubber stopper on it or a foam stopper rather and a little driver in there there's the speaker driver and those are soldered directly to the PCB so I have to be a little careful with those this whole process it's a bit more fragile than most things we take apart like a video card for example just because there's so much just small wires soldered to things and they did not expecting you to take it apart in services so not built to the standards we would typically be used to but now there's your contacts I think these are carbon contacts I'm not sure let's take these off actually we can look yes so you've got the contacts plate down there under it and they've got some super glue or hot glue here used at the corners I'm not sure or is that just flux it's bit of glue they're holding stuff in you can see some glue down here to some flux so not the cleanest solder job I've ever seen but a bunch of resistors bunch of capacitors labeled R and C there's shunt resistors even if it were like nvidia gpus you can short them to increase the power limit and then we've got a controller that reads AMT six-30 a I'd have to look that up as well confidential data sheet for it that's the top result on Google and it says it's a video display controller so AMT six-30 a that thing right there that's the video display controller which makes sense this is the PCB closest to the display and the datasheet came out 2015 to give you an idea for the age of the product let's see if it tells us anything I'll just read the general description here so general description in the datasheet says AMT six-30 a is a highly integrated video control see or system-on-chip with digital LCD TFT panel displaying controller and could support parallel RGB panels srgb pianos ITU 656 panels digital t-con and cpu panels ante 630 a integrates a video decoder and digital TFT LCD panel control that accepts analog NTSC PL and SC KMC BBS signals from TV tuners DVDs or VCR sources Wow including weak and distorted signals automatic gain control and nine bit one channel ad converters analog digital provide high-resolution video quantization with automatic video source and mode detection the marketing point is that it's highly efficient low cost and a small area PCB solution and then if you're curious video could decoder supports composite video signal C VBS input multiple standard supported for ntsc ntsc-j pan so yes so forth three analog inputs and one crystal required for all standards twenty-seven megahertz internal PLL to generate a video clock and then internal buffers for video stability and there's also noise reduction if you need it so pretty neat smell chip there for the other stuff most of its going to be on the other PCB this one let's look these up so this user says from what I can tell it looks like a hybrid of the original 1990 tip set design as well as the later SNSD APU on board which uses a single chip for the SPC 700 based audio hardware on modern chipsets the CPU is TCT data 978 the 2's pvu chips are combined into the tzt 976 the 975 is a single chip spc 7 honored clone and that is from ace on this forum see if I can find some more though on this by looking up the other number on the chip so these are if you want to buy just one of them they're a dollar 85 which is pretty expensive that's for one and if you buy 2,000 of them they come down a bit in price $2,700 for 2020 106 actually but what is it some memory so lion tech incorporated it is one megabit 128k times eight it is SRAM which is static memory and is that's also pretty expensive memory typically find it on like a CPU for cache non-volatile according to this and two point seven to five point five volts so that is actually memory are there multiple of those let's see there are different models so that one right there is one mega bit of memory non-volatile storage this one is so these right here there are three of those it says the lion tech ly six two two five six RL is a is a low power CMOS static random-access memory SRAM organized as 32768 words by eight bits is fabricated using high performance high reliability CMOS technology standby current is stable within the range of operating temperature and it is well designed for low power applications and particularly well-suited for battery backup non-volatile memory applications and this is a see who's this from this is from foreign Elcom if they are any ll com they are a seller of this chip so that's those are the parts now as for the the CPU and the other controllers my understanding presently is that one of these is going to be the CPU another one has integrated audio control and then the video processing is over on this PCB over here right there or at least the video decoder is over there so that's pretty much it for the Superboy SFC the only thing left is the small PCB connecting the controller inputs we don't need to take that out and there's nothing under this it's just where the cart reader goes when it's all socketed so now I can take the dust out of my screen I guess that's what we did all this for so that's it that's the Superboy SFC pretty cool small device and just from a gameplay standpoint it does work at least ours does I read a bit of mixed reviews on it on Amazon just on the review page so your mileage may vary I think it depends partly on what region your cartridges are from because you can toggle between different regions and I don't know how well it works for other regions but at least for the North America region they seem to work fine so far so yeah that's it if you want to check it out or buy one I'll link it down in the description below we may come back and review this more properly if you are interested in that please let us know so we can gauge the interest because it's a bit different but I think we can do some cool stuff with it like maybe try and benchmark it so that's it for this one you get a store dockyards nexus net to pick up shirt like this one or one of our mod mats or page on our coms house cameras next subscribe for more I'll see you all next time