Feeble Little Timesinks

Hey guys. I have a hobby of working on console and arcade hardware, so I thought I'd share some of the fixes and mods on the blog here.

These aren't going to be instructibles or the like, mainly just overviews so you can see if it's something you'd like to tackle. There's tons and tons of resources out there for all of these.

And first off, we're going to make it so that NES won't make you blow on the cartridges/wipe them down with rubbing alcohol/do the dance of the Casters in Dark Souls/etc to get your carts to load up.

There's two main culprits of this. The 72-Pin controller and the 10NES lockout chip. The first is due to an... interesting... design choice by Nintendo in the cartridge connector. Instead of being a standard top loader like nearly every other cartridge based system, it was a front loader that used a tray to seat the cartridge. Unconventional to say the least and the end result is that connector getting loose and going bad fairly quickly.

Luckily, replacing that connector isn't very hard, and also pretty cheap. You can find replacements many places on the web and on eBay. They should run about $10. Replacing it will give you a few years of ease before it needs to be done again. Obviously, this isn't a true fix to the problem... that would be the very nice Top Loader NESes that are a lot more expensive these days.

The second culprit is the lockout chip, which is normally used to prevent pirate software from playing on the system. The fault comes from the sensitivity of said chip and the general shaky connectivity of the cartridge connector in general. Basically, what happens is if there isn't good contact between the chip and the game, the chip will send a panic code to the system to make it constantly reset. Sound familiar? Yeah, it happens pretty often on most older NESes. Luckily, disabling that chip is quite easy and if you're replacing the connector, you're already going to be there anyway.

Disabling the lockout chip isn't enough to play Famicom games on the original NES, though. The cartridges of the Famicom still won't fit. You need an adapter, as well as disabling the chip.

Alright, well, let's see what's involved in this.



Your standard original NES. Banged up, but still going, like consoles SHOULD be. (I'm looking at you, current gen machines.)



Turn it over and remove the screws to take off the cover and it'll look like this. The shield is still over the cartridge slot housing, so it'll have to go next.



There you can see the cartridge slot housing, and that connector that needs to be replaced.

Also, a good tip for any console work, especially if you're going to be diving into something like a PS2 -



When you remove the screws to a section, place them down the way they go when you have to put it back together. The NES doesn't have too many different screw types, but other consoles and especially laptops DO. It's just a good habit to get into.

Anyway, take off the housing and we'll see the culprit in the clear:



And luckily, it's just held on by a normal slot socket. Just pull it off to remove it.

And, blogs here can only have 5 attached files, so the rest of this will be on Part 2.