3DO ZONE Forums

Hey there,

recently I came across the German Wikipedia article about the Commodore CD32 (released in 1993) - it said that due to
the age, many cd32 units tend to suffer from and take damage by leaking capacitors now.
It read to me like there was a certain kind or brand of capacitors built in that has reached it's expiring date now, since
obviously so many machines show this symptom at the same time these days.

My question: How about the 3DO capacitors? Anything yet? The 3DO is about the same age as the CD32 - do the
capacitors now show weakness as well?


Greetz,
Jones

From my understanding, as of now, this is not a problem with 3DO. It is pretty common for any old electronics to need capacitors replaced. It's on the top of the list of things to replace when restoring a system. Certain systems have nasty capacitors which leak when they go bad and cause problems. To my knowledge 3DO do not have this issue.

That said, there are a bunch of different models, so some of them might have this issue, although I have never seen anyone bring it up. There have been a couple instances I've seen with bad caps, but none that had damaged the PCB. It's certainly not as big of an issue as say, the Sega Nomad, which is very well known for it's leaking capacitors. If it were a problem, we'd likely know about it by now. You will have to replace the capacitors at some point in the future as they all go bad eventually, but it might take 10 years before your system actually needs to have them replaced and even then, they probably won't have damaged the system.

Alright - thank you!

Test them before you waste your time and money. Sure, some do fail, Rubycon 105° caps from 91-96 were a serious issue, the black ones, not so much the browns.