CPS-II replacement battery...

[dataDave]

FFS. I sit down just now ready to start soldering away and I realise that the screws holding the casing together are a special star-bit of some kind. What a load of ass!

Edit. I got in eventually using a normal screw driver.

Wow! The SFZ2 battery had never been changed until now! It's a red and silver Maxell Super with '96 02' written on it. The MSHvsSF one was from jun04.

That was a breeze for my first soldering job. I managed to splodge a big dump of the **** on one side, but luckily the de-solder pump saved the day.

The only problem is the boards now have these crappy brown stain marks which I presume are from overheating the joints. :/

Ah well, I don't think that's going to harm them. One thing though about MSHvsSF is that one of the screw bolsters was snapped off (previous to me opening it, I'm not that bad) which explains the scrambled graphics I had the other night before pushing the case more firmly into the A board.

Now I have to go home and check they work. Fingers crossed.

[kernow]

Those screw bolster things you talk of always end up breaking. I wouldn't worry about the brown marks either, they were on my ssf2x and I was the first person to open it. I love how people say 'every 5yrs' when its blatantly more like 10, depending on the battery I guess. I have a torx set for opening em, only cost like £6 quid in town and has about 60 different bits. But yeah I've only used one of em haha.

Glad you did it easily enough.

[dataDave]

Yeah man. They both worked when I got home too.

Although, I had the scrambled graphics on MSH vs SF again, even after pressing down hard. So I opened the case back up and get this: blu-tacked a fluorescent pen lid to the blue side so that the board can rest on it when it's pressed into the A-board.

We'll never be selling it so, lolz.

[Gradius]

I got one of them security screw driver sets from maplin. No screw will ever defeat me now. Next, world domination bwahahah