I haven’t recapped it yet. Obviously needs it, being 30 years old, and the audio is very faint which is a telltale sign at least those caps are dying. Tonight I took it all apart, saw a little bit of oxidation/possible corrosion on some SMT chip pins around the video area of the motherboard. Traces still look quite good though, no obvious capacitor juice anywhere. Tossed the dead lithium battery timebomb, did some quick cleaning with isopropanol and put a little deoxit on some of the more corroded chip legs. Analog board looks pretty immaculate, didn’t do anything to it yet. Reseated the simms and left the second bank of ram out this time.
Connected it back together and turned it on, and already saw quite a bit of improvement! The heavy flickering is still there and quite variable, but I’m not seeing nearly as many repeated or missing scanlines. However, after leaving it on for a few minutes it got a little bit worse again (though still not as bad as before).
I’m pretty optimistic now that a recap will fix this. Will update whenever I get that done.
