About

Last updated 2026-09-18

Revamp Bench is a record of console repairs actually carried out. We are not a repair shop and we do not take in work: every machine written up here was bought, opened, and either fixed or given up on at our own bench.

Every dossier is filed under the byline The Repair Bench, the editorial desk behind this site. It is a collective name for the people who do the work at the bench and check the measurements, not a claim of a single named author.

Why write it down

The part of old-hardware knowledge that goes missing first is the part that is actually useful: how a fault was narrowed down to one component. Forum threads keep the conclusion and throw away the process; videos skip the minute that mattered. We try to write the process down, wrong turns included.

What a dossier contains

Every dossier has three fixed stages. Symptom: what the machine actually does on the bench, and which observations rule out the fault you assumed you had. Diagnosis: the checks in ascending order of cost, with the numbers measured. Remedy: what was replaced, how, and how the repair was verified. The fault tree at the end lists the other directions the same symptom can take, some of which link to another dossier.

On the failures

The success rate field exists because it is not always ten out of ten. Some faults do not come back, and saying so is more useful than a tidy conclusion.

Method

Every measurement was taken on real hardware with a digital multimeter, and anything involving mains voltage was treated as live work. Component references (IC1, C4, F1 and so on) follow the silkscreen of the board revision named in the dossier. On a different revision the references differ.

Contact

Corrections, additions, or a note that something here is simply wrong: email [email protected]. We especially want to hear about wrong numbers.