Let it be known that I am not too proud to dig through trash in front of someone's house. I was heading home from work, and noticed a red joystick poking up from a box of rain-soaked VHS tapes (shame, I know). Naturally, I had to stop and see what this was about. From the pile came a big Street Fighter IV console, but this was definitely not from Capcom, or any other licensed distributor that I could see. So, it went into the truck, and I spent my lunch hour opening everything up to start drying it out.
It has been raining on and off for about four days in my area, and I was sure that this had been sitting in the elements for at least that time. It appeared to have been an eviction situation, a common sight on my side of town, unfortunately, but I discovered later during testing that the "Rabbit Maze" power supply was dead. Fantastic name for a power supply, to be honest. My guess is that the power supply crapped out, and the original owner just tossed in a closet or something, since the console was effectively useless without it. It would not have been difficult to find a replacement, but I had other options.
After getting everything apart and setting up some strategic fans, I let everything dry for about 24 hours before coming back to it. As an aside, if anyone tells you to put your electronics in rice after they've gotten wet, never listen to advice from that person again. This is not, and has never been, an effective solution for water damage, yet there is still a bunch of nonsense pseudoscientific claims about why this works. This got passed around on the Internet like the "you swallow 8 spiders a year" thing (fun fact; you don't). I can tell you as a former phone and laptop tech who regularly delt with wet electroncs, there is no magic bullet for recovering a water-damaged device. Your best chance will always be to turn the power off asap, disconnect and disassemble it carefully, and air dry the components for as long as it takes, and even that is not a guarantee of recovery.
Once the motherboard was completely dry, I started looking deeper into the way it was made. I found some interesting differences between this unit and the Jean-Luc Aufranc wrote about on his blog, which has me thinking that my version is a knock-off of the original Pandora's Box 5S, unless they made some minor (and arguably stupid) changes to the housing between production runs. As far as I can tell, our boards are identical, but the base housing on mine is split into two seperate compartments, whereas Jean-Luc's is all one piece. The speaker on Jean-Luc's is mounted on the side, where mind is mounted facing the bottom of one of the compartments where there are no sound holes, which makes the sound holes (technical term) in the other compartment less than useless. This also changed the screw placement between our units. My power button is round, where his is a rectangle, and the joystick stems are black on my unit. Nothing on mine feels cheaply made, and it's all really quite sturdy, so if it's a knock off, it's a darned good one if we ignore the silly speaker placement.
Since Jean-Luc cataloged the major components on the board, head to his site if you really want that list or what was on the SD card. If you've ever set up an emulator, nothing on the SD card is surprising or all that interesting.
Seeing that the the board lacked any visible corrosion or damage, I let it be, and focused on the issue with the power supply. It was supplying a 12v 3A DC current to the console, and I just happened to have a spare lying around that originally went with an old Xfinity gateway. Lo and behold, Xfinity couldn't be nice and just use a standard sized barrel jack on their power supply, so I had to cut that off, and solder the barrel jack from the original power supply to it. After plugging it in and testing, I was satisfied with the results, aside from the fact that I am apparently out of small shrink tubing. I won't lie; I'm pretty sloppy with wrapping electrical tape around small wires, so it definitely looks like a hacky mess. But it works.
After hooking it up to one of the test monitors, it powered on with some reluctant controls, but I'm glad to see the board is okay. The joystick is definitely not as sensitive as I'd like it to be, but all the buttons respond well. I'm thinking the joysticks just need a good cleaning, which will have to be done at a later date, but for now, it's playable with some patience. I cruised the selection of games, and oddly enough, they have just about every version of Street Fighter leading up to IV, but not Street Fighter IV itself. Guess that cool Ryu graphic is a lie. The other 950-ish arcade games on the SD card are actually not bad, with a few noteables like Alien vs Predator, Bubble Bobble, and Super Mario Brothers.
All in all, it was a nice little quick fix for the bench, and it will make a fun addition to the games in the Retro Room.