it's probably SECAM

I'm curious as well, I'm in my 20s too, but I'm always curious to hear how people my age got hooked as I'm sure we all have a different reason 😁

Here's a little demo of its capabilities :)

And last but not least, midi music !

Thanks for reading my thread !

Little demo of the test feature, now it sounds good!

Good as new 🥳

While I was waiting for the new connector, I also received the new caps ! I also gave a good clean to the PCB to remove most of the flux, it's now much better looking!

I just need to move the little ferrite beads out of their spots to cut the connection and run little wires to revert both of them. Simple yet effective!

By sheer luck, thanks to a friend, we managed to find an exact replacement ... Or almost. See how the connectors are 180° rotated ? That's a problem, that means the pins are reverted by 180° as well on the PCB side ... But I can manage that ;)

What's even worse is that I can't even put a standard din connector in there, they're a bit special ... I could try to butcher 3 of them and call it a day, but that would look gross I think.

But wait ... There's another problem now.

Remember when I said I preheated the PCB to remove the Roland chip ?

Well ...

That action melted the midi connectors 🤦‍♂️
(Here you can see that I already tried to disassemble them. They're not meant to be separated)

Good as new !!!

Upon closer inspection... I found the *actual* culprit, this little pest that didn't look even that bad had actually a cut between the trace and the eyelet ...

Piece of wire and good to go :p

You can also see my temporary capacitor fix 😅, I used some 10uF tantalum capacitors I had laying around because I had no electrolytics at hand, so I used those in the meantime, they're good enough

Next up, I removed the two Panasonic ram chips, cleaned the three corroded vias and I saw corrosion going below the big Roland chip so pre heated the board and then removed it to inspect below ... Sadly it was just a ground plane (and I managed to lift a few pads 😭, thankfully they aren't connected)

Meanwhile I experimented with Roland's self test feature and it has the "abcde" tags blinking meaning according to the manual that the sample roms are bad... Yeah something's wrong here.

I took off one of the rom chips closest to the leaky cap, but I could see anything wrong there so I put it back

Upon closer inspection, check this out !

Corrosion!!

At first glance it reveals ... Nothing ... But my keen eye recognizes something important ... The capacitors ! They're smd capacitors form the 90's and in my experience these go bad in a really catastrophic way