Why nobody talks about recapping a C64 vs just buying a working one

I spent 6 hours recapping my old Commodore 64 last weekend, desoldering each little capacitor from the board. My buddy Dave just bought a fully working one on eBay for $150 and was gaming in 10 minutes. I was proud of my fix until I hit a key and got a garbled screen anyway. Turned out I missed a bad CIA chip that no amount of capacitors would fix. Has anyone else wasted a whole weekend on a recap only to find out the real issue was something else entirely?

2 comments

2 Comments

finley9399d ago

Used to think recapping was the magic fix for everything. Then I spent a whole Saturday on an Amiga 500, replaced every cap, and the sound still crackled like crazy. A simple trace repair and a new audio filter chip later it was fine - caps were never the problem.

sage_lewis108d ago

Man, I don't know if I'd call it a total waste of a Saturday but you gotta admit, sometimes we get way too carried away with the whole "just recap it" thing. Myself, I've seen boards where caps were clearly the issue and other times where swapping them did absolutely nothing. @finley939 you're describing a pretty specific scenario though. Bad caps could have still been hiding a different problem, or maybe they were fine all along. Your mileage may vary for sure but I wouldn't write off recapping entirely just because one trace was rotted.