Well since I had a PC Engine in my collection now, along with a flashcard, I figured it would be rude not to get the PC Engine handheld console also since they can share the same game cartridge.
Looking on eBay I found one for a reasonable price and made an offer which was auto declined so I left it at that. A few days later the seller out a generic offer to people watching the listing, this gave me the option to send another counter offer which I was expecting to be auto declined again, but this time it was sent to the seller for consideration which he accepted.
So here it is! The PC Engine GT 🙂
I had done a bit of reading up on these before purchasing, and one thing that was clear was that it would need to have the capacitors replaced if it was going to survive. So I purchased a capacitor kit for the unit from console5.com
I could have sourced them all myself but knowing this pre-made set would have every value I needed, just made life a little easier.
My next step was to open it up and get to work. This is actually the first console I have tried recapping, and although I have all the required tools it was still going to be a bit of a learning curve. It all went well but I did run into one issue where it seems at some point in the past this console has had a “repair” done to it previously. The audio capacitors had all been replaced with standard through-hole capacitors rather than the surface mount ones. My original plan was to swap these out with the new SMD ones from the kit, but this is when I realised, whoever had done this repair had ripped all the solder pads off the board! I expect this is why they then went with through-hole capacitors so they could fix their mistake.
After carefully working around this bodge job and replacing the remaining capacitors, everything was cleaned and re-assembled. I now have a nice condition, working PC Engine GT which will hopefully last for a few more years to come.
What a great handheld this is! I can’t imagine how amazed I would have been if I had seen one of these back in the day. Even the display on it is pretty good and clear compared to the absolute garbage that was the Sega GameGear.
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