Leaked battery & corrosion: My attempt to restore this 386 motherboard!

This SOYO 019L1 had a BIOS battery that leaked and corroded components and traces around the battery. In this video, I will restore the motherboard and remove the damage caused by the battery. I will clean the board, use white vinegar to neutralize the existing corrosion, and fix issues with the solder mask above the traces. If the board works after all this work, I will run a few benchmarks to check if the board performs as expected. This motherboard will be safe to store for many years without risking further damage.

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*AliExpress: Mechanic Solder Mask*
(this is the exact item I am using)

*Amazon US: Solder Mask*

TheRetroWeb (SOYO 019L1):

CPU Galaxy: 286 Board Restoration & Testing [Leaking Battery and Exploding Caps]

Article about replacing leaking batteries from old motherboards:

00:00 Intro
01:10 PCBWay
01:42 SOYO 019L1
02:38 Remove connectors
03:33 Initial cleaning
05:33 Remove solder mask
07:24 Tinning copper traces
07:47 New solder mask
08:47 Reassemble and build
11:12 Power on
14:36 Install DOS and conclude

[drPeidos]

Using an engraving pen is a great idea to remove small areas of mask. I should buy one. Thanks.

[ThBeowulf]

I completely agree with the "bios must be blue" sentiment. Great job! It's always fascinating to watch this hardware come back up life.

[upgrade]

I hope you can keep this machine running for many years

[FritzchensFritz]

I have no experience with 386 bios menus, but I really like the colorful default colors. Clean works as always!

[ruthlessadmin]

Always a joy to see an old board brought back to life.

[OpenGLever]

Yes, i played X-Wing and its successor Tie Fighter in 1993 and 1994. I had the floppy disk versions and i completed both games. For X-Wing i also bought the two Addons B-Wing and Imperial Pursuit.
With X-Wing i've ruined my joysticks multiple times. After the first one broke, I bought a second one. Until that one broke too. Then I changed my strategy and unscrewed the joystick and tried to fix it. That was one of my first repair attempts, I was still a child. The joysticks were constructed quite cheaply and did cost less than 40 DM. The dealer didn't have any others for sale either. Back then the choice was very limited.
The cables from the ground plate to the buttons on the stick were torn apart. So I routed new cables through the very tight stick. But they were too stiff, so that the joystick was quite stiff and uneven.

Fortunately, at some point a new joystick the CH Flightstick was offered. It had to be good, because it was three times as expensive at over 120 DM. This joystick has lasted far longer. But since it used 50k potentiometers with sliding contacts for the axes, these also broke at some point. Luckily those were a lot easier to repair because I just had to buy new potentiometers and swap them out. I did that 2-3 times and then also played through Tie Fighter with this joystick.
The CH Flightstick was basically a good joystick, but it only had 2 buttons and 2 axes and lacked USB and was therefore no longer suitable for later games.

Oh, one more thing. I also bought X-Wing Alliance sometime around the turn of the millennium, but I haven't played through it until today. I didn't have the time and inclination for that anymore. But I still have my old savegame files, so I could finish the game at any time.

[christopherjackson]

I've noticed corrosion tends to follow copper traces and vias through a pcb. I'm not sure whether this is capillary action or just a result of the chemistry. Its astonishing how far it can travel along a trace without any effect on the intervening sections of pcb

[indimopi]

Excellent repair! I did play x-wing as a kid but never managed to finish the first level. I just remember the first fmv.

[helldog]

Not only is an external battery connector an option, but there is a PCB you can make called not a varta which plugs into where the Varta Battery would go and has circuitry to allow the use of a cr1220. It's a cool project.

[the_beefy]

I spent countless hours on X-Wing, and before that, Rebel Assault. I re-acquired them a year or two ago when all Star Wars games on Gog went on sale. :)

[rodhester]

these old boards and works of art.. thanks for the video.

[kasimirdenhertog]

I played Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter from 1997 for many, many hours. It was the first game that I played in multiplayer over the internet. Microsoft offered the Zone as an online matchmaking service/community and although it could be rough getting it going with dial-up modem, it was lots of fun.

[hernantuduri]

Great job!, and you remember me when I was young and play that game. 😅

[dfxvoodoocards]

Nice, like ! Those old 386 / 486 motherboards look so different from later ones from the Pentium 2 / 3 era.

[boydpukalo]

Really cool restoration. Sadly my very first computer a Dell P90 is long gone to the obsolete electronics landfill. The 1990's were exciting times with computer advances and the new fangled thing called the internet! I got into computer just as 3D gaming became a reality with consumer voodoo hardware. Doom was mind blowing when it came out.

[GigAHerZ]

As always, check if there is a MR-BIOS for this chipset on the motherboard. If there is, i strongly recommend to switch out the bios. Amongst other things, you will get support for multi-gigabyte HDDs, too.

[JamesPotts]

I never played X-Wing, but I loved Tie Fighter.

[dazamad]

Im currently working on my 386. Same thing. Ive re tinned the taces and just waiting for my formal coating to arrive. Nive video
Should point out i have a motherboard that only has external battery connector and it does have charging on it. It was by design i guess

[SianaGearz]

I've never actually seen even a badly abused, dead and swollen cr2032 leak! And it's easy enough to re-engineer the circuit so it does't try to charge it.

I'm also fairly confident in NiMH replacement cell types being OK in the leakage department. It's spectacularly difficult to leak them. The leaky cells were all NiCd.

But it's also perfectly fine to have a different risk assessment.

[pvc]

Replacing solder mask after tinning is not needed. Solder itself does pretty good job at protecting copper traces from oxidation.