A warning to Doujindance Duo owners.

PCEngineHell · 01/20/2016, 07:25 PM

Just a fair warning. A couple of years back I had did some slight clean up on a Duo-R HercTnT had purchased from him. It had video issues after arriving from Doujin that someone had attempted to fix for Herc, but was unable to get everything resolved completely. When Tim sent the system to me I noticed the system would power up to a grey, purple, or blue blank screen. It was maybe 1 out of every 9 power ons. It did not matter if a hucard was inserted or not. I opted to not tinker too much at the time, as the main issue for Herc at the time was the video issues, which were resolved.

So fast forward to now, the system arrives as I planned to buy it off Herc, either to fix up more or use as parts, and the blank screen shit had gotten worse, happening half the time you power on. In addition to that, randomly the system would boot to a black screen with blocky gibberish that looked like text sorta that would change back and forth.

/FatLeeAdama/vlcsnap-2016-01-20-18h09m27s169_zps8vfwk18b.png

I suspected it was the region mod pcb causing the problem. Upon closer inspection I could smell the thing had that "electronics burning" smell going on. I ended up snipping all the wires being fed to it, powered back on multiple times and found the blank screen and gibberish issue went away. The cd-rom system start up screen booted up fine now.

Now here is the dilemma. That black gunk Doujin pours over everything. Well, I can say that in this case I was able to remove it all. It was a slow and painful process involving snips and a razor. So what treasures did I find under all this shit? What forbidden secrets did I uncover for all the world to know?

Well, 4 damaged traces. The guy had carved, knicked and scratched them in multiple spots by mistake I guess. Two were looking very iffy because the scratching was very deep. After tracing where everything led to I did some patch work, and covered the exposed traces with some acrylic coat, reconnected all the pins to their proper ends and got the system working fine again.

Those with Doujindance systems need to be very mindful that if you get similar symptoms as stated above to be ready to send the system out for repair. Odds are good someone can just swap out region pcbs with the solid Obey one by just reusing all the wires already in place, granted all the wires are soldered in place fine and nothing is shorted.

But with me I wanted to know wtf exactly he did wrong, and I did not like what I saw, so just a fair warning. To anyone having to repair his botched shit, per the above, rest assured you can remove the black rubber gunk. Just be prepared to blow 4-5 hours of your time doing it.

mickcris · 01/20/2016, 07:35 PM

I think it's epoxy he puts on the board. Not sure exactly why he does but my guess is he's afraid of his wires coming loose during shipping since he probably ships them all overseas. Not saying that makes it ok though. He should find some other way of doing it.

SephirothTNH · 01/20/2016, 08:38 PM

Honestly I had always heard that Doujindance did poor mod work. IIRC his stuff has shown up in that messy mod work thread that was inspired by drakon.

I'm glad you got it working again! I have a soft spot in my heart for rehab units.

Vimtoman · 01/21/2016, 04:23 AM

I think you'll find 90% of the people that do mods themselves have poor soldering skills and just general rework skills.
I hate to think what half of the mods look like.

Could you post some pic's?

Maybe we should have a post of "Mod Horror's"

Duo_R · 01/21/2016, 04:27 PM

ouch, I had a DuoR modded by him originally. I can't remember if I did anything to it (because I also region modded the system, etc) but I don't recall the gunk. But last I checked it worked fine. But thats too bad.

SignOfZeta · 01/21/2016, 08:11 PM

Quote from: Vimtoman on 01/21/2016, 04:23 AMI think you'll find 90% of the people that do mods themselves have poor soldering skills and just general rework skills.
I hate to think what half of the mods look like.

Could you post some pic's?

Maybe we should have a post of "Mod Horror's"

For the prices some of these people charge I'm surprised anything works at all.

PunkCryborg · 01/21/2016, 08:37 PM

Do you have pics of his bad mod work from when it was first purchased? I have a RGB modded duo that I bought in 2010 and it's been just fine but it wasn't region modded. The workmanship in the mod is just fine though and the cable was well made. You can only blame someone so much for a 20 year old console failing unless it's directly related to their workmanship

PCEngineHell · 01/21/2016, 10:36 PM

Quote from: PunkCryborg on 01/21/2016, 08:37 PMDo you have pics of his bad mod work from when it was first purchased?

Quote from: PunkCryborg on 01/21/2016, 08:37 PMYou can only blame someone so much for a 20 year old console failing unless it's directly related to their workmanship

The problem was directly related to the region mod. Once removed the system stopped being problematic on power up.

I didn't bother with pics of the traces, because honestly as I was doing the repairs I wasn't planning to fully document and do a thread on this. The traces were probably fine anyway, and just looked bad as fuck all. My patchwork and acrylic coat was preventive maintenance I opted to do.

Mainly, initially, I just planned to show Herc what was going on. Thats the only reason I bothered to snap a pic of the gibberish screen (I actually took a full video of it and gave it to Herc, the screen shot is taken from the video). But after talking to Herc I opted to post so people would know some of the symptoms of the region mod pcb of his going bad at least.

Herc has had this system for a long while. Honestly I don't even have an issue with his soldering work, and I have had a Duo-R worked on by him prior that I got in a deal from Bernie that worked fine. His soldering work itself is very clean.

I never said the soldering looked sloppy, so I am not sure where people are getting that from. The traces being scratched and shit though is messed up, and I am not sure why he did that, outside of just being careless. The trace damage could have been prevented by laying some masking tape down before going to work on cutting the pins. Its basically the 4 traces that run behind the card slot on the Duo-R.

He also epoxied the rgb board onto the main board and did it upside down so the caps on it cant be replaced if something goes wrong. Another thing that was careless and not forward thinking.

Nor am I cool with that epoxy shit at all since its a massive pain to remove. You don't need me to post pics of his epoxy, and pics are not going to capture the smell of burning electronics. There are already pics of his systems with that epoxy shit posted so you can view them elsewhere.

But as is, others have complained about having issues, and with me seeing them I felt kinda obligated to at least let people know what to look for in case their region mod is going bad. I don't know what chips he used for the mod because he sanded the tops, so I don't know if they were quality ones or not. What I do know is something was going bad and I removed and scrapped the fucker.

To be clear, I got no agenda here on this. I don't sell modded PCE systems, so its not some "the competition is lying about Doujin" kind of thing. The only thing I care about is that I was able to get the system back up and running, because I mean, its a fucking Duo-R, and to warn people on what to look for symptom wise. And to inform that the epoxy can be removed for repair purposes, so people don't just scrap or toss Duo's he worked on in the trash if something goes wrong, thinking all hope is lost.

Doujin already has a semi bad rap in some circles, so there aint nothing I can say that probably has not been mentioned already, or that is going to make him look any worse. At this point all people do need to know is that his shit can be undone if done carefully, and the systems can be repaired.

thesteve · 01/21/2016, 11:34 PM

altho i find his work a bit odd, what i have seen of it wasnt problematic (but i do have an orphaned region board with sanded chips laying around)

Dlang6487 · 04/29/2017, 11:37 AM

Doujindance's work is pretty great now. I opened up a region modded /RGB console and everything is on one board that looks like it was mass produced. Although I have a Tg-16 ever drive that is v 1.4, it works great and so does the CD drive. Honestly, his work now looks nothing like his older mods. Like anything, he probably has gotten better over time. I have tried to attach a picture but I guess it's too big.

SignOfZeta · 04/29/2017, 12:48 PM

I hear ya, the thing is, soldering isn't oil painting. Even your first projects should be dead reliable. It's not like every first year EE makes nothing but garbage for his first 80 projects and slowly improves to the point where they work reliably. Shit I made in 8th grade still works.

sirhcman · 04/29/2017, 01:13 PM

Quote from: Dlang6487 on 04/29/2017, 11:37 AMDoujindance's work is pretty great now. I opened up a region modded /RGB console and everything is on one board that looks like it was mass produced. Although I have a Tg-16 ever drive that is v 1.4, it works great and so does the CD drive. Honestly, his work now looks nothing like his older mods. Like anything, he probably has gotten better over time. I have tried to attach a picture but I guess it's too big.

1 post.. no photos. Call me skeptical..

mickcris · 04/29/2017, 03:52 PM

go to imgur.com or some other photo hosting website. upload it there and post a link.

MobiusStripTech · 05/02/2017, 11:50 PM

I just had one open last week. Still the same shit.

ClodBusted · 05/03/2017, 01:22 AM

From EEVblog.com and 1-2-do.com forums, I know there are plenty of spammers trying to sneak into popular forums on a daily basis to do (more or less hidden) advertising now for all sorts of technical stuff, amazon affiliates and clickbait websites. There's a good chance Dlang is one of them, unless he has a way of proof.

mickcris · 05/11/2017, 02:02 PM

Looks like he did clean up his work a bit