Sega Game Gear Appreciation Thread: Separating The Men From The Boys

That’s an awesome video, I skimmed through it this morning. Will watch in more detail, along with the GG Light Gun video later today.

How much trickier would you say the McWill mod is vs a recap for the GG? I’ve recapped my Game Gear, and felt pretty confident in that task, but would love to know if the McWill mod is particularly harder than that operation.

Thanks for watching. Glad that videos benefit fellow enthusiasts.

On a scale of 1 to 10, the mcwill mod has a difficulty of 10/10 if the recap surgery is rated 6/10. The hardest part is removing the SMD resistors, FETs and capacitors, without ruining the PCB copper trace because they are so tiny. Daylight is highly recommended to aid visibility. Among the 10 to 15 tasks that could fail the mcwill mod, there is a particularly-daunting step which requires removing an SMD resistor and re-using that to replace another tiny component. If the copper trace under that component to be replaced, got curled up due to excessive heat from desoldering it, the entire “surgery” would fail irreversibly.

However, if you take your time and do it carefully(take short breaks after each step), it is definitely do-able. Also, if you have a 7$-40watts soldering iron like mine, keep the mains switch closeby … you will need to turn off the power supply every 4 to 5mins just before the tip gets too hot.

The light gun mod on the other hand is a "walk in the park " as compared to the mcwill which is “getting up to Mt Everest’s peak”.

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Great post, which also gives me major clues about one thing I’m wondering how wise is to do: buying a collector’s conditions Game Gear (the pre-modded ones usually come loose and quite scruffy) and then send it to a modder, in order to get it recapped and McWill-ized. It does indeed look like a huge risk, doesn’t it?

Correct, there is a high risk involved for the mcwill mod. Thus, a McWil-lized black GG unit goes around 400usd on eBay. There are mod service which costs about 150 to 200usd. Usually the modder would have at least one unit that is Mcwill-lized and tested stable, he would simply swap the main board in your GG with that of his stable modded unit. This way, any failure does not impact the deliverables as he is held accountable for the GG that is sent to him. Before the swap, he would also check that the main board of the GG he received, is in good working order. For example, if the main board does not output a steady regulated supply > 4.9v < 5.45v, it could not be McWil-lized later. He would then quote additional charge as “repair fee” which actually covers for his loss of a GG stock for McWil-lizing.

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Ha, that’s interesting! Thank again dude, very helpful.
And the fun part is that I’d love to get one not even for the LCD alone, but for that nifty VGA out, so I can connect the system to the OSSC and play it on my 27" monitor. That’s what I’m interested in the most.

After a few weeks of obsession with my new Neo Geo Mini, I found myself picking up my GameGear again, playing the GG shinobi. Following that, I got into the modding mood once again, and this time I built a GG Satellite (yes, I named after the NES Satellite)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tet8X-Sodg

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But what is it?

It is a very small analog TV broadcaster, sends the video of my GameGear to any old school television or modern HD TV that has an analog tuner. This is also a convenient way to get video to some vintage TV sets that only support coaxial (no SCART /composite video inputs)

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Wow… where’d you get the yellow box for it? Looks like not a home-made thing.

This is super cool, awesome job!

Thanks! The yellow box is home-made with using my old 3d printer, the STL files for it are available at this link:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3221766

You are amazing!

Very cool! Looks like real stuff from SEGA’s studios. Like prototype equipment or something.

I would send that GG TV broadcast to another GG that has the TV tuner

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Early twitch streamers

@Khaz That’s a great idea. I have a tuner cartridge lying around. :slight_smile:

I played a Mark III on a Game Gear via the telecon pack and TV tuner…

I’ve got the pics somewhere, was going to make an article about it.

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Here we go:

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Sweet!

Absurd in a good way.

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