SNES Game Doctor SF7 Restored

[pcmantinker]

I have a broken Game Doctor SF7 with the DSP1 and original connector and 128mbits of memory that I'm looking to sell to someone, for a low price ($50 or best offer + the price of shipping), who might know how to fix the unit. I originally paid about $200 total for the unit, the RAM and the DSP1 connector. It was lightly used and put away in storage after I got my SNES PowerPak a little while back.

I only discovered recently that my SF7 doesn't boot anymore. I'm not exactly sure what is wrong with it since I'm not really an expert at hardware troubleshooting on devices like these. It could be a bad floppy drive or it could be something else. I've also got about 100+ floppy disks, some with games and labels on them, that I could include with the unit. Note, inclusion of the floppies will increase the shipping cost.

If you are interested and might know how to fix the unit, please PM me for more details. The unit is sold as is with no returns or warranty.

Due to recent discoveries, I do not think I will be selling my SF7 after all. I apologize for any confusion or leading people on. Now that my unit works, I'd like to hang on to it for the time being. It's one of those rare collector items that are hard to come by in working condition these days.

[blargg]

Well, when you power it on in a SNES, does it show the main screen? That's not dependent on the floppy drive. When you first plug in the power adapter, does the floppy drive make a little motor sound? Might as well post how it responds to these because it's useful basic information for what might be wrong.

[pcmantinker]

I don't see the main menu when turning it on with the SNES and external power. I just see a black screen. The floppy drive doesn't light its LED either or make a sound. I had been using a Sega Genesis power supply for powering the unit. I checked that the polarity of the power supply was correct and that it was providing enough voltage and amperage. This setup worked in the past, but lately it's not been working. Something may have fried on the SF7's motherboard. The SF7 requires extra power for maintaining the RAM's state and powering the floppy drive if I remember correctly.

If the unit is beyond repairs, I wouldn't want anyone to deal with a broken unit. Perhaps I could salvage some parts from the motherboard such as the SNES cartridge connectors. They seem to be in pretty good shape and may be useful for other projects later.

[blargg]

If the floppy doesn't make noise, it might just be the regulator or power connection, since I believe the floppy would make some kind of noise when it first gets +5V (moving the stepper to the end of its run). Regardless, if someone wants to buy it knowing these symptoms, more power to them!

[pcmantinker]

If I had more knowledge of tracing connections on circuit boards, I'd attempt to fix it myself, but sadly I do not. It's possible that it's a problem with the power regulator as it doesn't seem to be even powering on the SF7 at all since I don't hear a buzzing sound from the floppy drive. When it was in working condition, I used to hear that buzzing sound that floppy drives make when first receiving power. It's a shame to see such a nice SNES copier in this condition. I used it quite a bit before using my SNES PowerPak. I played through many games on this SF7 in its peak usage.

I no longer have any computers with compatible floppy drives or parallel ports so it's more difficult to use with modern computers. However, I used an old IBM Thinkpad with Windows 98 SE, an external floppy drive and CD drive. I even had an NIC PCMCIA card that I used to network with my newer desktop PC for copying roms over to the Thinkpad. I still have my old IBM Thinkpad at my parent's house, but I didn't bring it with me when I moved for my new job. I used to format my floppies as 1.68MB to get the 12mbit capacity and fit up to three 4mbit games on a single floppy. I also played Neviksti's 96mbit Star Ocean hack on 8 floppies with each floppy being 12mbits.

In short, my SF7 will be missed and I hope that someone interested in this one has the know how to fix it. It certainly is a good collector's item.

[TmEE]

I looked inside my SF7 and there is not a lot that can die. There is a reverse polarity protection diode on the DC input and a 7805.
The firmware EPROM may need to be reseated.

[Hojo_Norem]

I can't say that I'm an expert on the GDSF7 but what I can say is that I rarely hear or see the drive do anything on my unit when external power is applied.

Have you tried using the regular pass-through connector rather than the DSP one? Does your SNES have a lockout disable switch? Perhaps the knock-off lockout inside the SF7 had died. What about cleaning all the cart edge connectors, including the SNES one?

[pcmantinker]

After taking apart my SF7 and playing with different configurations, I was able to get the main menu to come up again. It turns out that one of my 64mbit RAM sticks is bad and my floppy drive is toast. Other than that, I was able to get my 32mbit stick and my working 64mbit stick to be recognized by the system and copy my Donkey Kong Country 3 cart to the RAM and play the game. This is a much better verdict than what I had yesterday.

At least the unit still works. It just needs some work done. I didn't test the parallel port since I don't have my old IBM Thinkpad with me to test, but I'm guessing that still works. I'm still asking for $50 for anyone interested. I don't feel like messing with the system anymore as I've got my SNES PowerPak for development and playing games. I'm thinking that I'll get a Retrode soon so that I can dump my own ROMS and game saves from my carts for my SNES.

Here are some images of my SF7 and the main menu with DKC 3 running:
http://www.cameronjtinker.com/images/SF7/photo1.jpg
http://www.cameronjtinker.com/images/SF7/photo2.jpg
http://www.cameronjtinker.com/images/SF7/photo3.jpg
http://www.cameronjtinker.com/images/SF7/photo4.jpg
http://www.cameronjtinker.com/images/SF7/photo5.jpg

[pcmantinker]

I got everything working again. It turns out that I had the polarity reversed on my power supply for the SF7 and that was causing problems. I did have to change the floppy drive as the one in the unit was broken. I had a new floppy drive that I bought a few years ago with the intent to install in my desktop PC but never got around to installing it. It's one of those new black floppy drives for putting into new computers that have a black case. Now all 128 Mbits of memory works and so does loading/saving games to and from disk. I haven't thoroughly tested the DSP1 adapter as I forget if you actually need a DSP1 cart in the SF7 to play DSP1 games or not. I did play Super Mario Kart from the SF7 memory though with Super Mario Kart in the SF7. I'll have to test Pilot Wings later and report back.

[blargg]

It's great you got it figured out. Someone donated one of these to me a while back and it's quite nice. I love the optional real-time save state feature, including being able to save it on disk. It sometimes glitches, but it's very helpful for hard games. It also has patching of a game in RAM, making it easy to keep trying patches and testing them without reloading it (I used it to make some enable-interlace-mode patches for Super Metroid and Zelda, since this looks better on a large TV).

[Movax12]

If you own an old copier, it may be worth installing a floppy-drive emulator, though I don't know which one is best/best value. I wouldn't want to spend too much, but loading from mass storage has to be better than an old floppy.

[pcmantinker]

It's great you got it figured out. Someone donated one of these to me a while back and it's quite nice. I love the optional real-time save state feature, including being able to save it on disk. It sometimes glitches, but it's very helpful for hard games. It also has patching of a game in RAM, making it easy to keep trying patches and testing them without reloading it (I used it to make some enable-interlace-mode patches for Super Metroid and Zelda, since this looks better on a large TV).

Yeah, I'm very glad that I was able to get it working. I haven't really used the real-time save feature before, but it sounds like a great feature that the SNES PowerPak doesn't have currently. The patching of games in RAM sounds awesome. I'd be interested in seeing your enable-interlace-mode patches for Super Metroid and Zelda. I no longer have an CRT TVs so this would be nice to see. I may pick up a small CRT TV at some point to be able to play Duck Hunt on my NES and some games with the SNES Super Scope.

If you own an old copier, it may be worth installing a floppy-drive emulator, though I don't know which one is best/best value. I wouldn't want to spend too much, but loading from mass storage has to be better than an old floppy.

This would be an awesome alternative to an old floppy drive. Thanks for sharing this information. I found a couple options on eBay that might be suitable for a replacement:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/3-5-Floppy-Disk ... vi-content
http://www.ebay.com/itm/3-5-USB-SSD-Sim ... vi-content

These are both sold from China so it would take a while to arrive in the States, but might be worth looking into. I could store disk images on a USB flash drive and theoretically play every compatible game without the need to change physical disks. I will look into getting one of these and possibly using a 2GB flash drive with floppy disk images for the ROMs.

[MottZilla]

Do you think using the wrong power supply is what damaged your RAM and Floppy Drive in the first place?

I have two GDSF7s. One needs a new floppy drive. But they are good machines. They probably aren't that rare though. Of all the copiers I think the GDSF series was *very* successful. After Nintendo sued Bung who made them out of existence.

[pcmantinker]

It's possible that my floppy drive was damaged by the wrong polarity. My RAM is fine though after changing the polarity on the power connector. I just stripped the cables and reattached them correctly. I did self test on the system and everything reports a good status.

You are correct about the Game Doctor SFs not being rare as a whole. I was more referring to how most people seem hang on to their units these days after purchasing.