PC Engine Duo randomly crashes after region free Hucard mod

[serbusfish]

I have installed a Region Free board in my PC Engine Duo today and i'm having issues with it. At first the Hucard games loaded fine but would crash after around 30 seconds. I checked my solder work with a multimeter and everything seemed good but I decided to reflow all my joints just in case, after I did this games worked for much longer, I can play games for a fair few minutes at a time but the console will still crash eventually. I was playing Final Soldier and noticed shortly before it crashed enemies stopped appearing and certain background objects didn't look right, then it froze.

I should also mention that I made a big mistake with the CPU. While grounding pin 29 I accidentally pulled the pad for pin 28 off the board... I dont know if this pin is important as looking at the schematics it doesn't go anywhere? But regardless I grounded it for now as I didn't know where else to connect it. Could this be related to the crashing?

EDIT: I reflowed the pin connections again and managed to run the console for an hour and a half before it froze up suddenly.

[Keith Courage]

So no random problems before the install?

You are correct that Pin 28 doesn't go anywhere on the HU6280 but you shouldn't ground it. Just don't connect it to anything.

[serbusfish]

No issues at all before the install. Is grounding that pin going to cause issues?

I decided to remove the board as I was much more concerned with getting my system working again, the thought of buying another recapped/RGB modded Duo didn't thrill me in the slightest.

I rejoining the cut pins with a mix of straight solder and wire. It's not the cleanest solder job in the world but the system seems to be functioning OK, I left Lords of Thunder running for about an hour then played through it for another hour and there was no issues at all. The next day I did the same thing with Final Solder and all was good. I'm going to do more testing but i'm hopeful the system is back to a fully functioning state.

I think I will just settle with buying one of those universal Hucard adapters to play my imports, I wish I had done that from the beginning but you live and learn I guess...

[Keith Courage]

What Region chip did you purchase? I'm not a big fan of those small ones that bend to fit in between the Bottom and top pins of the hu card slot.

[serbusfish]

This is the one:



https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/193142454399

[Keith Courage]

Those should be fairly reliable. I don't use those myself as I dislike how one has to cut the original card slot pins so short to install but I do use another method that utilizes the same chip that is on that board. I wonder if one of the pins for the chip needs to be re-soldered or if the Switch itself is faulty inside. I've actually had faulty switches cause the crashing issue you are talking about.