CD32 Problem... Help required. :(

[DyLucke]

Hi there again, this morning i unpacked my CD32 from it's "vacation" inside my "retro-cabinet"... Place where my retro-devices do their R&R after several time on duty.


I unpacked it from a four months retirement and plugged it to test some game i got from eBay recently... Banshee.

When i turned it on it showed the little CD32 introduction perfectly... Nice, then i put the disc into the drive... After a few seconds i got the usual OS screen telling me something went wrong... "Not enough memory".... DUH!

Reset... Everything went fine...

However here it ends the good stuff and starts the pain...

As long as i got a little pissed off by that strange error message i decided to try some other games... Just in case.

Tried Microcosm... Original.
The system hangs when the Psygnosis logo shows up, turns screen to grey, and after a few seconds the logo returns for a second and goes away... Grey screen again. And so on.

Tried Dragonstone... Original.
Got an error messsage telling me "cannot execute file"

Tried Liberation... Original.
"Not enough memory" ... again?

Tried Simon the sorcerer... Original.
Introduction loads, but speech is choppy, sometimes it enters into a loop, and then continues on... After the intro the system hangs over.

Tried Guardian... Original.
No problems noticed.

Tried Oscar... Original.
It seems to work.

Tried Whale's Voyage... Original
System hangs over at the "loading" screen.

Tried 444 games compilation.
After some MINUTES loading i got some "recoverable alert", telling me some library was missing... DUH!!!

Tried 200 games compilation.
Ages loading, only the mouse pointer was shown after it...

So... That's it... Something is really wrong with my CD32, and the only thing i can see after a visual chechout on the board are both liquid capacitors to be a bit inflated, one of them with a little leak.

Could it be all this mess produced by these caps?
Or maybe i have some other component blown up? Some memory maybe?
I wouldn't like to tag my CD32 as "kaputt"...

Anticipated thanks guys.

[DyLucke]

Thanks Rich, it seems you were right about the caps.

I've replaced'em and it seems everything is back to normality with the CD32.

However i do have two questions, i've noticed after a couple of hours the capacitors i've installed are a bit inflated... I don't know if this could be normal due material dilatation.

If not, what is going wrong here? Maybe the PSU is giving a wrong power output that could damage these caps?

Or as long as i'm using a NTSC CD drive, on a PAL console could it harm the components?

I can't see any difference between PAL and NTSC drives aside a couple of rubber pieces, red for PAL version and blue for NTSC.

I've replaced the disc drive since the PAL one is refusing to read CD-R's, could i correct this problem or is the drive just wasted?