Play pc engine cd game for 5 mins and the chip is around 50c based on my feeling
That could be why they left an opening in that plastic cover. They were anticipating that chip getting hotter than others and didn't want to melt the plastic.
Thanks for the replies! It does seems normal for this chip to get hot, and the plastic cover opening makes total sense.
I have three Laseractive units two of them are American (they were in storage until today) and one of them is Japanese, this last one is the one giving me problems.
Basically what happens is, it plays all Laserdisc games and movies not problem every time all of the time. But when playing Mega Cd games after a few minutes during gameplay, the discs will stop/pause spinning, and then start to play again at random. Almost feels like this happens when the system temperature raises.
I have ruled out the Sega Pacs because they all have been recapped and they all work fine in my other American systems. I've also replaced capacitors all over the Japanese Laseractive boards making very little difference.
The Japanese Laseractive model seems to be the newest revision of them all (judging by the 1996 date) and yet, it seems to be the less reliable. In my other two units, the boards show some type of last minute modifications (such as the addition of smaller IC board fixes) but on this one there aren't any. Also this is the only unit (out of the three) that the power supply has the additional IC protector like the one seen in the pic below (Thanks to BlueBMW for the pic)
I've also tested for bad/shorted/open ic's but they all check ok. When I first got it, the power supply had some leaky caps and it also looked like someone had messed with some of the potentiometers (I manage to tweak them until the unit was able to read all discs again), also replaced the laser with a known working one thinking that could be the obvious culprit, but still works and behaves exactly as the old one did. And finally, I've followed all of BlueBMW's recommendations I've found on the net, with little success.
Is there some sort of trick for these Japanese models that I'm not aware of?
Your help is greatly appreciated, thanks again!