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Finally, A Working NES!
vandel405 writes "We've seen the NES PC Conversion, and we've all lusted over the top-loading NES. But, top-loading NES's aren't something you're going to pick up at a garage sale. How can you resurrect your 8 bit console hero? Easy, with this news guide from ArsTechnica! Now you can make your 8Bit NES as reliable as your linux kernel. No more Blow and Pray!"
No more Blow and Pray!"
just like the girls at church
Really, replacing the connector isn't hard, requires no soldering, and cost me $17 CDN just a couple of years ago.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I've actually got a Top-loading NES. I'll sell it for $100 :P
I'd be there are some on ebay, but the problem would be finding 'em. I don't feel like searching through a few hundred listings though.
I did find this 72-pin connector for replacing the cartage edge.
The NES cleaning kit also helps a lot.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This requires you to cut your nintendo case and use even more space with 4" of cartridge sticking out of the back. Plus, nothing is like coming back from a frat party and trying to load Super Mario Bros 3 while verbally abusing your nintendo :)
-dk
My friend has a top load NES and we've been playing it a lot this year. It's the shit! We don't really use the PS2 except for a DVD Player. The games seem just as addicting. Even though the graphics aren't the best, it's still very fun after all these years. Just goes to show how good graphics can't compensate for good game design.
Will this void the warranty?
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
Before you dig out your soldering iron, try this first. Clean all your cartriges with your favorite cartrige cleaner and some isopropol alcohol. Then take your Nintendo apart, and clean that motherboard connector the same way. Now clean all the pins in that big, strange looking black connector with something flat, slightly abrasive, lint-free, and some more isopropol alcohol. Use some really fine grit sandpaper if you have to.
Now put the whole thing back together and forget about solder. Usually the insides just need to be cleaned, as the copper oxidizes slowly over time.
I turned an almost useless Nintendo into one that worked perfectly in under an hour at no cost.
And you can still load from the front!
How To Repair Your NES
It lives up to it's name: http://www.sanspoint.com
The key to getting those old things to work a bit better isn't blowing.
To get cartridge playing the first time you insert them withut blowing is to open the NES and bend all the connectors out a bit.
Those things are a bit weak and tend to bend into the piece of plastic they're attached to, that's why after years of intensive use your NES doen't play games as well as it used to. Not all pins are conneced propperly.
I always found that a little rubbing alcohol did the trick. Get a tissue, pour the alcohol on it, and rub it lightly onto the metal connectors on the cartridge.
At first I thought this was just working 'cause it was cleaning the thing, but I found that I had to do it over and over to the same cartridge every time I wanted it to work. So I figured maybe it helped make the connections. It's been a while since I did any chem, tho... does anybody know if rubbing alcohol would help conduct?
See, back in 1993, I told you to get one of them top-loading NES's. They were selling for only $50. But NOOOOOOO, you said your old box version was doing just fine. Now, ten years later, who's system still works perfectly? Hmmm? Serves you right.
(Of course, I never use the thing. Emulators and all. Wonder how much I could sell it for on e-bay...)
Like someone said, all that effort isnt neccesary.
I took my motherboard out (of the nes), wrapped very fine grit sandpaper around a half popsicle stick and rubbed those connectors down. Blow it out good (canned air works well.)
Then i dipped the edge connector slot in some tinning solution so it wouldnt corrode again. Wash with some distilled water, let dry, put it back together and it has lasted untill so far. No problems with games booting or losing saved games.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
I had pretty good success with opening it up, cleaning the connector with rubbing alcohol, and bending the pins up a little bit (so they grip the cartrige tighter). Replacing it entirely probably works better, but you might want to try something simpler first. YMMV
Now you can make your 8Bit NES as reliable as your linux kernel.
Believe me, my NES is EXACTLY as reliable as my linux kernal.
Now if you'll excuse me I'll be attempting to get the fscking thing to survive a boot sequence...
I cannot believe this story got linked. Look, the ars technica story is bullshit. It's half-assed and it's absolutely idiotic. Go to mcmelectronics.com, get part number 83-3785, the "NINTENDO TYPE 72 PIN CONNECTOR" and then just take apart your nintendo, pull out the old edge connector (it's a slide-on/slide-off procedure, no soldering or glue involved) and REPLACE IT WITH A NEW ONE. Then you're out like $6 + shipping and you didn't have to cut a hole in anything. Then again, if you like sticking it in from behind, this might be the mod for you.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
My favorite hobby is fixing semi-working game consoles because it's so damn easy.
First, find a console where, either the game just doesn't make the connection unless it's put in just right, or one of the connectors (controller, power, etc) has a similar problem.
This happens because a lot of (gradual) force is exerted on those connectors, and the designers were so stupid as to not insert something to take the punishment. In otherwords, everytime you plug in a cartridge, you are damaging the solder connection a little more.
Now that you know the problem, it should be easy to fix. Open up the system you bought for $5 at a pawn shop, and find the damaged connector. All you need to do is heat up a soldering iron, and add a little bit more solder to each one of the pins connecting to the board.
In some cases, the system was used in it's state for a good ammount of time, and the actual etchings on the board are damaged. In that case, you simply have to trace the etching te the next solder point, then connect a wire between the two.
With that info, you can now repair 90% of the consoles on the market. The other 10% were either dropped off of a building, or hooked up to the wrong AC adapter (``POP"!!!).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Now you can make your 8Bit NES as reliable as your linux kernel.
:(
Guess I shouldn't try this then... just recompiled my kernel and now it won't boot
Yeah. It scares me a bit that most of it is a quick "how to solder" primer - if you can't solder, you're going to kill your NES and burn the fuck out of your hands *looong* before you ever get it working.
I repair my ancient 4x CD Rewriter using some meths, a couple of cotton bud, a death metal CD and a hacksaw ... and you all get to see the pictures!
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I once had a NES that was thrown 40' over the edge of a deck of a house that sat on a steep hillside.
Crushed by this abuse of my baby, I picked her up and carried her inside, I had spent so many a hours with her and metroid, amungst other games.
Upon openening the case, I noticed that the PCB had cracked near the AV out panel, across only 3 traces. I found some blue wire wrap wire and began carefully soldering the 3 traces.
After slapping what was left of the case back together, I put in a cartridge and pressed the power button. Sucess as I turned up the volume to annoy my father with my victory over his rage on my defensless nintendo.
**Shudders**
Man, I have a friend with a NES that works perfectly. Mine worked perfectly before I sold it to him! :( (A mistake I would not make again)
Anyway, it's what? A million years old now? Give or take an hour?
My XBox died tonight. That stupid DVD-ROM thingie that everybody loves so much about modern day machines went out! It DIED! DEAD! It won't read a CD, it won't read a DVD movie, it won't read a single damned thing!
After doing a web-search I found that this is common on the XBox, and apparently there is a high demand for used DVD mechanisms taken out of broken XBoxes.
So I called Microsoft and much to my shock they were aware of this issue, considered my XBox still under warrenty, and are going to repair the unit.
Now, I would like to point out that this XBox is hardly used because there really just aren't that many great games for it. If I had to guess I'd say the machine has maybe between 60 to 80 hours of use.
Now, that old Nintendo probably has somewhere near thousands of hours of use. LITERALLY Thousands. We figured out long ago that the old "blow on the terminals" trick isn't even necessary. If the game give a flashing red screen or solid black screen we simply turn the machine off, eject, reinsert, power back on (sans blowing) and it is normally fine.
Do you know how many times I ejected that DVD and reinserted it into that XBOX? At least a half dozen. Trying to "Clean it" to make sure the disc wasn't defective probably created more scratches than existed previously and it wasn't until after I tried other games that I realized it was the XBox, and not the discs.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that while I actually remember cases of Nintendos breaking down they were the few sad stories, and not an epidemic.
So while people might complain that those 15 year old game machines are a pain in the ass to get running, just remember, they don't build them like they used to. And they don't make the games nearly as fun, either.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
For games like Final Fantasy or Zelda, you probably will need to replace the cartridge battery
What happens on a lot of older PSXs is that the laser goes out of focus. There are guides to do this around the internet, but from what I remember it seemed quite tricky.
An alternative that a friend of mine once did was to replace the black cd mount (laser, motor, etc... basically the moving components of the drive) with that of a very old sony discman, which had the same shape and connections. You have to make sure you have the right one for it though.
I remember seeing them in KB toys in STACKS....oh well
The main appeal is there's no spring load action and its more reliable
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
I actually had the fortitude in my younger days to save up enough cash to send it Authorized Nintendo Repair Service. While it didn't amount to a great deal (replaced the connector...sound familiar yet?), it still put me out US$50.
:-)
Of better note, however, was the tech who serviced my console, and brought up an interesting point I haven't seen posted yet. The very "fix" we used to use (blowing...air, that is) as youts is the major cause of corrosion. Yes, I know copper oxidizes on its own, but when introduced to a moist environment, the process is accelerated.
"Moist environment? But this is my Nintendo?" you may be asking yourself. Consider this: besides CO2, we also exhale H2O. Condensation of that water vapor on the cartridge contacts is the main culprit. "But the velocity of a blow on the cartridge would negate any condensation," I can hear some saying. Nay, if your warm breath, no matter how fast, comes in contact with a colder object, condensation will form.
But we're all slashdotters. We all knew this already, correct?
No more Blow and Pray!
Hey, if he's doing it with absolutely no regard whatsoever for static protection, there's gonna be plenty of blow and pray... and I don't see a single wrist strap in the photos.
*PLEASE* use static protection on anything you're repairing or modding. Why? By the time you see a static electric spark, it's on the order of 3,000V per millimeter. Sure, there's very little current behind it, but it's still more than any one of the millions of MOSFET transistors in a microprocessor or memory chip can handle. And it only takes about 25V to exceed the dielectric strength of the gate-junction layer in a typical MOSFET.
Static damage is seldom obvious. Usually, a damaged system will still boot and appear to work. But one bad transistor out of the millions in a memory chip or CPU can make it intermittent. What if one bit in a RAM chip sometimes spat back a 1, no matter what had been saved there? The computer would probably work just fine... except for the occasional "inexplicable" crash when the CPU tried to execute an instruction read from that RAM location.
A wriststrap and antistatic pad are *so* cheap and save *so many* problems.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Can someone please take their time to explain to me why the words "linux" and "kernel" are contained in the above post?
/dev/null.
The only explanation I can think of is those words automagically alter the probability of acception and posting of ones` submission to slashdot, in much the same way the words FREE and ENLARGEMENT alter the probability of e-mail ending up at
But procmail does not get paid to do that.
???
my
This is not B.S., It works. This is commonly done by antique radio restorers to fix faulty switches and controls. It was also a trick used in the days of "slot cars". A similar thing is done by using di-electric grease on light bulb sockets and spark plug contacts.
Radio-shack TV tuner cleaner (which leaves behind a lubricant) is another thing you can use if you want to get fancy. Craig Labs "DE-OXIT" (available on the web) is what the pro's use.
WD-40 attracts dust so you can use the fancier stuff if you believe your gaming system is collectible.
This is from someone who does a lot of repair of high-end test instrumentation...
Thanks to a good cleaning. The edge connector on the motherboard is mostly to blame, it gets corroded over time. The actual pin connector that makes contact with the cart is actually very durable, none of my pins have bent to the point of no connection despite this unit being 15 years old.
Some suggestions to get your unit working:
1. USE AN ERASER. YOU MUST, -MUST- DO THIS.
Smirk if you will, but erasers have been the #1 most effective way I've found for getting corrosion off conductive surfaces. When you open the NES to clean the edge connector, use these before you use any chemicals.
Even better, you can use erasers to clean up your cart pins just by running the side of a pencil eraser along your cart's pins. You can use the pencil to reach down in there, so you don't even have to remove the plastic case.
2. Still having games with flashing green screens at boot? Use the friction between the pin connector and the cartridge to your advantage. Since this is a metal-on-metal connection, you can use the two connectors to cut through the grime.
Insert the cartridge so that it's not quite seated in the back and push it down so it locks in and the pins bite down on it. Now, if you push hard, you can still move the cartridge forward just a little. Without removing it, carefully push it forward. It should move all of a few millimeters, but that much friction between the two will cut through corrosion on both the cart and the pin connectors.
You should be able to make games work more often on the first try with this trick, although admittedly it may not be good for the long-term life of the connectors.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.