My favorite NES repair from during my game store days. A customer returned a game because it didn't work, and had a rattle. Uh-oh. We got him a working copy and threw in extra store credit for his trouble. Opened the game and found that one of the ICs was lopsided. Flopping around under it was a resistor, legs bent from the factory. The game had the correct number of resistors installed, so we think what happened is that a loose resistor fell onto the board, the IC got soldered down on top of it, and the game worked fine for decades. At some point the resistor got dislodged and made contact with the pins, causing the game to crash. I didn't even pull the IC off, just grabbed the resistor legs with fine pliers, fatigued them until they broke off, tested the game, and put it back on the shelf. In hindsight I wish I'd kept it, because that was a really neat curiosity.
@@TheSliderW yea. there are comments, but most of it is profanity. there are no coworkers. the only contribution is when lizzie took a nap on the keyboard. i commented out her code and wrote "meow" on the first line. not sure what she was trying to accomplish but it caused a segfault.
I’d love to see you take that broken board and revive it in an OpenTendo board. Especially with something like a HDMI or RGB mod. Great video as always!
13:00 Worth noting that oxidization isn't the only problem the connector faces. With a lot of use, the pins can get bent a little too far up. This is mostly seen with a lot of Game Genie use, which has to bend the pins farther than they were intended, which can lead to the system no longer able to make contact with normal games without the Game Genie wedging itself into place. This can usually be fixed by adjusting the pins back at the same time as cleaning it, though, so still usually no need to replace the connector.
1980's Nintendo would've never suggested deoxit for the un-plated connector because for that to happen Nintendo would have to admit a fault and we all know Nintendo is faultless. So instead third parties gave us dozens of cleaning cartridges that barely fixed anything for a problem Nintendo pretended as if didn't exist.
@@scotshabalam2432 Howard Phillips said Nintendo of America was afraid kids would set themselves on fire if they had suggested using isopropyl alcohol. So anything remotely flammable would have been a "DO NOT USE". -Official cleaning kits contained some alcohol but it was in tiny little bottles.- edit: It looks like even the official kits might not have included any liquid solvents at all, just abrasive pads. 3rd party cleaning kits did though.
Playing the game from the oscilloscope is like Tank's role in 'The Matrix'. "That's the woman in red, that's a car." while watching the Matrix waterfall.
That white box that is missing from the broken board I think is a ceramic resonator and that supplies the clock for the CIC chip. Probably that was the problem and not the actual CIC chip.
I agree!! GOOD Catch! I was looking at a close up of a board after I saw your comment and the component is marked on the silk screen as X2 and 4.000MHz. Then on the schematic that is off to the left side of the "button and LED" section. That oscillator ties back into the CIC through an inverter on pin 6
Back in 1988 I cut the CIC out of the circuit and replaced it with a 555 to create the power on reset. It worked great. I wish I knew all you needed was to cut pin 4.
The only thing I did different with the CIC chip was instead of cutting pin 4 off, I unsoldered pin 4 from the motherboard and instead grounded it, so that pin 4 wasn’t floating. I did this on my own NES 12 years ago, and still works perfectly.
From the NESdev wiki: "There appears to be an internal pulldown inside the CIC such that leaving pin 4 floating or merely cutting pin 4 will also work."
I'd love to harvest the parts off the broken board and use it to build one of the new PCB replacements. I actually have one around here somewhere and I've never gotten around to building it.
I think you should get a new NES replacement motherboard. I know they are pretty cheap then unsolder everything from the old motherboard and move it to the new one. Get one of the new clear plastic NES cases and build it and give it a new life! I would love to do a project like that. I just fixed my old SNES that I bought in 1992 and me and my son have been having a blast playing it I have a bunch of games (I was surprised how much some of my game sell for now!) I would love to find and old NES. I no longer have my NES but I have a bunch of my old games for it. Hey if you don't want to do it, send it to me and I will make videos doing it!
Been fixing and modding NES consoles for many years. IPA works just as well on the PCB contacts. Transistor 2SA937 (Q1) is where the PPU is sending the video. I would pull the chips and build a Opentendo or something. Pop the NES CPU into a C64 would be fun.
"Displaced Gamers" on youtube goes into extreme detail about how code on the NES really works. It's my second favorite channel next to Digital Basement :)
I made an "NES in a picture frame". It's a fully functioning NES, with everything visible. I made a straight cartridge connector instead of the one that loops around, which has the PCB from an NES game (Mario 3, that I took from a broken cartridge) in it. Because of the straight connector, both boards are visible from the top side. To make the motherboard fit in the frame, I took off the RF modulator, and built a little video signal amplifier for the video signal. The motherboard is powered with 5 volts (with a USB connector). In the front of the picture frame I put the original power/reset switch board, with the buttons sticking out, and I did the same with the joystick ports. Works just like a normal NES.
I'm still impressed with the quality of the original NES - playability, durability, design, longevity - a truly great piece of consumer electronics. Thanks for sharing.
Build an OpenTendo! You have a donor board now with the PPU and CPU. I built one and it was a fun electronics project. Its now my main NES I play games on.
I too have found these old consoles, not just the NES, "just work", unless there has been some physical damaged, broken wires, busted up from being dropped, or liquids spilled inside. The main problem is that cartridge connecter being damaged. One time out of about 50 consoles I did find a leaky capacitor.
This video brought back memories to Christmas morning 1986 when I got an NES (with the light gun and ROB). It was defective and it would constantly flash reset when you put in a cartridge like when the CIC chip has failed.
Those boards came from my collection. I was very brutal with them because I was only interested in the sound chip/CPU. I had dreams of building an 8-bit synthesizer from them, but after a while I gave up as I dont have the time or proper tools to do it. The reason there are three was to increase the polyphony and tone options. The sound chip produces 5 voices: 2 pulse wave channels, 1 triangle wave channel, 1 noise channel, and 1 sample/PCM channel. So cool that they found their way to the Digital Basement! ❤
@exidy-yt iirc, that machine had been dropped on that corner and the modulator was bent up. So I just chopped it off because I only wanted to preserve the cpu.
We ask that you obtain a NESessity board or Opentendo and swap all the components over on camera...probably a pack of new capacitors will be recommended while you're at it...yes we've seen it on other couple of channels...but you're a real enthusiast that adds to the enjoyment of our retro community
you may not realize it, but that small nes mobo that looked like it had an encounter with a VERY hungry caterpillar was a whole rollercoaster of emotions for the 19 minutes you handled it, that little guy lived through some stuff and is still roaring to go
The Zapper has a dedicated pin on the connector so the wire story checks out :), buttom right when looking at the front side of the console This really is a case of they dont build them like that anymore. Goes for all electronics. In my gameroom / attic i have lots of older electronics. VCrs, CRTs, etc everything keeps working. Its the newer "retro consoles" and stuff that gives issues like the X360s, ps3 that sort of stuff that gets laser issues etc. due to all the moving parts. Also when you look at the materials that where used, tvs and vcrs where build like a tank. The last gen vcrs where cheaper plastic already. My 40 year old Betamax vcr still works like a charm with better picture then the 15 year old newer VHS VCR. Weighs 3 times as much lol
One thing you may be interested in, even if it won't be massively useful, is that certain Japanese cartridges have an extra sound chip on the cartridge(Castlevania 2 off the top of my head has 2 extra sound channels, but there's others, including a shooter by SunSoft that contains a Yamaha chip that I just can't think of the name of) and won't work on an American or PAL system because even though the pin still exists, it isn't connected. There's a mod to connect this pin back up again using bodge wires. Most modern flash carts can emulate these chips, as any NES game made after 1987 will use expansion chips and won't play without them. In fact, I think SMB1(1985) was the last game by Nintendo themselves to not have an expansion chip, as the NES is unable to use bank switching without one and without bank switching, there is a max cart size of 40kb(32kb for program and sound data, and 8kb for graphics data) which, yeah, isn't really enough. The fact that your cart can play SMB2 shows it can emulate at least some of these functions.
CV2 was originally a Famicom Disk System game, and used the extra sound capability of that; CV3 had the VRC6 chip in the cartridge that added two extra square waves and a sawtooth wave. Game Sack just did a video on all the FC games with expansion audio chips.
Someone has probably already said this, but OAM = Object Attribute Memory. It contains attributes about "objects" (essentially sprites) on the screen, i.e. the X, Y, sprite index, palette, in front of/behind background flag, and horizontal/vertical flip flag. This system was also used in the Gameboy/Gameboy Color's PPU, though with a slightly different layout to the bytes and flags.
Yep, light gun trigger and sense were a distinct input to the CPU. Triggered an interrupt vs. being read from a shift register. On the SNES it was also wired to a pin on the PPU that latched the exact beam position, as the Super Scope, Enforcer, etc. were pixel-accurate and didn't require the blank-and-flash blocks like the NES did.
The broken board... I'd love to see you get an NESRGB (PPU interposer) and build a replacement PSU for it. There are projects out there for it, albeit not intended for this level of carnage. But, I think you could still get it back to stable, usable console! Maybe keep it to see about Lumacode when there's an NES version? Oh! And there are CIC replacements out there. They perform the proper operations, mines the lockout functions. Inexpensive too. Yes, you can spend a lot less and get a repo PCB to repopulate - but you will still need to find replacements for the can (the part broken off, it's the PSU, audio and video circuitry) as well as the CIC chip. Seriously though, I think it'd be pretty rad to get that board back into service.
I remember wikipedia claimed some bootleg games used to defeat the CIC chip by sending some kind of voltage spike, I wonder if that nuked it somehow? Physical damage I guess would be more likely, given how close it is to the broken part of the board.
When I made my portable NES in 2001 I removed the the RF modulator and just fed 5V from a DC-DC converter and tapped into the composite video and audio. I had to make a breadboard composite video amp (using a 2N4401) That NES with the broken off RF modulator could still work.
For the PCB with the missing section, you don't need the RF Modulator, but you do need the power supply bits and the AV out, and there are some open source replacements for that circuit. There's only a few signals that go to that area of the board, so even if it's mangled, it could be salvagable. For the weird shutdown state, try adding a large electrolytic capacitor with higher than 5v, this should prevent brownouts. Btw, I highly recommend disabling the CIC chips. I would do the full procedure; i.e. don't leave the cut pin floating but tie it to ground. OAM is Object Attribute Mapping. It's basically the data for each of the 64 sprites it can display each frame. Also with a couple of resistors on the edge connector you can enable the extra sound channels that you get when running Japanese games (either via adapter or flash cart). I think it's called an "expansion audio" mod. Also there are a few open source motherboards now, that you can reuse the old chips on. Do not replace the 7805 with modern 5v buck converters; even if they're compatible and it seems to 'be working", they introduce a lot of noise into the circuit and can add jail bars to the video output.
You have to really appreciate how Nintendo built this machine back in the day. Almost all off-the-shelf parts, besides the 2A03 CPU and the PPU of course, where the 2A03 is practically a 6502 with just some additional support guts and they removed the BCD mode. Which probably didn't have a lot of purpose for videogames anyway. Actually was interesting to hear about how DeoxIT is all that's needed for the cartridge pin connector though. I've replaced a few of them here and there for people, but sounds like that's wholly unnecessary, and maybe even worse not addressing the actual problem!
On the last board you made me fell so much better!!! Many times I get something working in the kludgey testing set up all day long and then connect everything like its supposed to be and now its not working!!!!
This was great (even if they are built like tanks with little to repair). Definitely interested in more console repair content. Your explanations and troubleshooting process is superior to other channels. Optical systems like PS1, Saturn have more to go wrong which I'm currently wrestling with.
Ooh, or what about getting a TV with a built-in VCR where the VCR stopped working, and mounting the board in such a way that you stick the cartridge into the slot. I guess you'd have to replace the black piece with one that doesn't require pushing the cartridge down afterwards.
I have two Front loader NES consoles, I've had them for a while. I think I got them both "broken"; the more recent one I got at the thrift store a few years ago for a few dollars because it did not work. I cleaned things up, boiled the connectors and bent the pins back into place and they work just fine. I like bending the pins back beyond where they would normally go so games boot without even being pressed down.
I'm always sad by the condition of NES consoles I see online. Mine is in great shape...and I used to take it apart as a kid for fun! Still works and looks great.
ENIG was first used in 1990, so it would not have been available to put on a 1985 console. ENEPIG would have been the best option at the time, but because it contains palladium, it was prohibitively expensive, hence HASL.
Seeing NES content here is a very welcome and pleasant surprise! It never hurts to have spares of one of the all-time best consoles, as I can attest. When I moved out of state, it was handy having my original at my parents' while having a duplicate in my apartment.
if you ever come across Nintendo consoles in the future, I recommend you running some hardware diagnostics (often called "aging tests") to determine possible edge case failures
5:57 OR alternatively you could just mod it to be RGB only, and solder in a better modern NES power board replacement. Alternatively The part that was torn off isn't strictly necessary at least in most HDMI replacement kits.
My Xbox one with only having like 8 hour in total of use died sidently one day just being unused for about 13 month and my NES from 1989 have been without being use for more than 2 year and the thing works like the first day. Amazing how things are not built today like the 80's stuff.
The CIC chip might not be bad, it just might be more sensitive to ripple/intermittent voltage drops on the 5V rail, since the bulk capacitance seems to have been in the missing modulator section (these types of crocodile clips are quite high in resistance in my experience)
It's funny I just bought my first NES as well as a Famicom, multicart, Family BASIC with keyboard, disk drive adaptor and drive emulator. Next would be to mod them and you just showed me how. Thanks..😊
yes, do not buy replacement connectors unless you want to waste money. The replacements are not build the same way and do not allow normal insert/remove of cartridges. You basically can't use the console with the top cover on. beware.
The tutorial I followed years ago told me to not leave that pin 4 floating. It will work but it may be flaky. So just use a resistor to ground it or something.
I have made a video about how pretty much any flashing NES can be fixed with deoxit. So many people bend/boil/sand the pins when all that does is damage the connector.
I actually did that same CIC disable mod on my NES though I attempted to pull the pin cleanly out of the board but ended up breaking it off entirely though for a time it worked. After a few years though I went to turn on my NES and it didn't respond and testing voltage rails I at one point checked the reset line on the CPU to find it was still being held in reset and then discovered that line came from one of the pins on the CIC chip. Ideally I have read that you should ground pin 4 rather then leave it floating and maybe that is why it eventually failed on me and maybe why it failed on you as well on that one board and maybe you've just been lucky with the other ones you've done that to. I eventually just pulled another CIC chip from a game cart from a sports game I never play and replaced the bad one in my NES while grounding pin 4 to a test point I found under where the chip goes for a clean look and it's been working ever since. I can also still play that sports game if I wanted to on the CIC disabled console. Oh another thing to note is you might want to pull out the capacitor on the RF modulator. It might not be obvious but on mine and in some videos I've seen there is a tiny bit of electrolyte that had leaked on the board so I ended up replacing it with the same value but smaller one I had.
Something interesting, very early Famiclones (bootleg Famicoms and NES consoles) used a near 1 to 1 copy of the Famicom mainboard, and Pin compatible clones of the PPU and CPU, so it's possible to install genuine ICs into them. That, or you could build your own "Nintoaster"
you should turn the broken board into a usb c powered nes with its own bootloader and put the games on an sd card. maybe even attach its own screen and make a handheld version :)
I bet that's why someone salvaged the RF modulator on that board. They tested it, CIC chip was bad, they couldn't figure it out so they just yanked the RF modulator from it for another board. They could've taken their time and done it more gently. Someone with the knowledge could build a working NES around that board, though.
When I got my NES December of 1991 the Zapper didn't work either, My dad threatened that he might have to take it back to the store. That night he took it upstairs and the adaults hooked it to the living room TV after we kids had gone to bed and guess what, Zepper worked. So instead of taking back the NES we just had to replace the really old TV that the NES had been connected to that first day with a new TV and it worked fine. That same NES now lives its life in my living room connected to my RetoTink 2X Pro connected through a composite switch box and then connected out to an HDMI switch box and into an OLED TV. My later acquired NES's including my Top Loader live in my Office with some unconnected aside and my top loader connected to a CRT. and eventually one may live its life in my son's bedroom if he decides he wants one I use my office setup for Zapper, R.O.B. and Power Glove scenarios. My Power pad lives in the living room but has not seen use in the 4 years we lived in this house yet because life hasn't allowed it.
would kinda be fun and intresting to give the broken mobo a second opportunity in life as content, but also because everyone loves to see old beaten up, electronics working. i know this isn't the channel, but it might be a good mobo to design a custom case and do some modding
Never seen a NES from the inside. I was expecting these motherboards to contain more chips like the C64, but it looks really sparse or low cost to me. Especially how they have soldered the RF modulator to the mainboard doesn't look state of the art.
I was a bit confused when you said you'd issues with the zapper because I had it in my head that all the signalling was done via the shift register in the controller, but there are apparently two additional data lines that don't get used by the controllers. I'm guessing it's one of these that's used to detect of the zapper registered a hit and that's what was broken in your NES.
You don't need to hold the game down for it to work. In fact, some cartridge ports fail in such a way that, if you press the game down, the CIC circuit stops making correct contact, but works like a charm if you keep it up. As a side note, Famicom-to-NES cartridge adaptors can only work when kept up, mainly because Famicom cartridges are too thick, so they cannot be inserted into the slot, therefore the adapters take the shape of a regular cartridge with an insert port at the top (had the game really needed to be kept down, they would have to have a weirs S shape at the top).
Interesting. That PCB with the missing modulator would be a perfect candidate for making a nintoaster. If you go to vomitsaw's channel he made the nintoaster that AVGN uses. The video on it is super old, but it doesn't use the modulator. Since then, it's been upgraded with an HDMI mod. But in theory that particular board is perfectly fine. It just needs a little bit of help.
one common fault is nes light gun or bazooka , requires a crt to function due to refresh rates etc. ,unlike the power glove which bases on ultrasonic location
Think that damaged board has a bit in common with my NES. Someone before me cut the IRQ trace and bridged it with a bodge wire. They didn’t realise they cut an adjacent trace making it unable to boot, just a grey screen. I eventually spotted the issue and added a 2nd wire to take care of that and it boots every time now. I haven’t defeated CIC, yet. I do have an import adaptor though
some of those cartridge pushdowns have pins that are bent out of shape or have lost their retention strength. In those cases replacement is the only option
Certainly is a rather brutal amputation on that one board, but, despite its' issues, it is a survivor, may be missing parts, but it can live on in a "lightened" form... :P
The reliability of these boards is probably down to the fact that the circuit is so simple in comparison to other designs of the day like the C64 with all its custom chips. Since you don't have cases for those two boards, maybe it would be best to create mini-arcades with them. Otherwise you could go full 'Ben Heck' on them and turn them into handhelds...
Consider making a pimped out custom shell for one to allow to it come back into use. Let the rest go into the general retro parts supply channels - they will help other NES's in grave need.
Make an NES picture frame like the cork board job from a few years back, only hook it up to a multi game cart and a power source. That way you'd have a cool pcb picture frame you could hang that could serve as a working NES. 😂
Maybe try to assemble a fully functional, hacked together NES just using parts you have laying around? Maybe use the board that has a chunk missing. Basically just freestyle a solution to get something reliable that works as a complete console. It could kinda be like the C64 episodes where you repaired the boards with just a basic set of tools.
It's not quite true that disabling the CIC by cutting a pin grants perfect playability of all cartridges. Any official and modern carts will be fine, but some old pirate carts would use a voltage spike to stun the CIC and with the pin cut, that voltage spike can be passed to other components instead. Disabling the CIC also affects the reset button since the CIC sits between the reset button and the reset circuit, but there is a different fix that cross-connects two pins to bypass the CIC's ability to reset the console and leaves the reset button free to function while leaving the CIC otherwise functional.
I noticed that (well it looks like; not sure if the power was actually being sent) you snipped the leg of that CIC chip with the power still connected? Perhaps that led to its demise?
Am I the only one who thinks that we need to save that left for dead board? Given how much love the Plexus received, and this seems much simpler, would it not be cool to restore it to it's former glory despite the abuse it's been thru?
I mean, it's kind of what Adrian does on this channel. Never forget the "left for dead" C64. Or all the Tandy repairs. Or the SWTP system. Or the banged-up Macintoshes. Or all the misbehaving Amigas...
@@exidy-yt agree, not a fair comparison. I was simply saying I loved the attention the Plexus got and would love to see this nes board get to live again. I get it ,Adrian's got a lot in his backlog, and this would most likely not be on top, but still... call me nostalgic
![Adrian's Digital Basement ][](http://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AIdro_k7CrQRe71qN6c0Ua7A1P_I8KkxjqLa70u0zYeCvdvnKw=s48-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)
My favorite NES repair from during my game store days.
A customer returned a game because it didn't work, and had a rattle. Uh-oh. We got him a working copy and threw in extra store credit for his trouble.
Opened the game and found that one of the ICs was lopsided. Flopping around under it was a resistor, legs bent from the factory. The game had the correct number of resistors installed, so we think what happened is that a loose resistor fell onto the board, the IC got soldered down on top of it, and the game worked fine for decades. At some point the resistor got dislodged and made contact with the pins, causing the game to crash.
I didn't even pull the IC off, just grabbed the resistor legs with fine pliers, fatigued them until they broke off, tested the game, and put it back on the shelf. In hindsight I wish I'd kept it, because that was a really neat curiosity.
Adrian in 10 years:
"Why did i put 2 checkmarks on this pcb? It MUST mean something, right?"
I can see that happening
i can do that with old projects and code i haven't touched in a decade.
@@LordOfNihil Comments are always a blessing, if not for your co-workers, at least for your future self
@@TheSliderW yea. there are comments, but most of it is profanity. there are no coworkers. the only contribution is when lizzie took a nap on the keyboard. i commented out her code and wrote "meow" on the first line. not sure what she was trying to accomplish but it caused a segfault.
@@LordOfNihil hahaha X )
I’d love to see you take that broken board and revive it in an OpenTendo board. Especially with something like a HDMI or RGB mod. Great video as always!
yeah an RGB or HDMI mod should be possible with the broken board, especially after the reset hack
13:00 Worth noting that oxidization isn't the only problem the connector faces. With a lot of use, the pins can get bent a little too far up. This is mostly seen with a lot of Game Genie use, which has to bend the pins farther than they were intended, which can lead to the system no longer able to make contact with normal games without the Game Genie wedging itself into place. This can usually be fixed by adjusting the pins back at the same time as cleaning it, though, so still usually no need to replace the connector.
It's criminal that you don't have a Deoxit sponsorship 😂
Remember: Deoxit that socket!
1980's Nintendo would've never suggested deoxit for the un-plated connector because for that to happen Nintendo would have to admit a fault and we all know Nintendo is faultless. So instead third parties gave us dozens of cleaning cartridges that barely fixed anything for a problem Nintendo pretended as if didn't exist.
deoxid should make a statue of adrian and place it at their offices
@@scotshabalam2432 Howard Phillips said Nintendo of America was afraid kids would set themselves on fire if they had suggested using isopropyl alcohol. So anything remotely flammable would have been a "DO NOT USE". -Official cleaning kits contained some alcohol but it was in tiny little bottles.-
edit: It looks like even the official kits might not have included any liquid solvents at all, just abrasive pads. 3rd party cleaning kits did though.
Heck yea, stuff ain’t cheap.
Playing the game from the oscilloscope is like Tank's role in 'The Matrix'. "That's the woman in red, that's a car." while watching the Matrix waterfall.
>that's the plumber in red, that's a goomba.
That white box that is missing from the broken board I think is a ceramic resonator and that supplies the clock for the CIC chip. Probably that was the problem and not the actual CIC chip.
I agree!! GOOD Catch! I was looking at a close up of a board after I saw your comment and the component is marked on the silk screen as X2 and 4.000MHz. Then on the schematic that is off to the left side of the "button and LED" section. That oscillator ties back into the CIC through an inverter on pin 6
You need to mark AND date these things.
Back in 1988 I cut the CIC out of the circuit and replaced it with a 555 to create the power on reset. It worked great. I wish I knew all you needed was to cut pin 4.
The only thing I did different with the CIC chip was instead of cutting pin 4 off, I unsoldered pin 4 from the motherboard and instead grounded it, so that pin 4 wasn’t floating.
I did this on my own NES 12 years ago, and still works perfectly.
From the NESdev wiki: "There appears to be an internal pulldown inside the CIC such that leaving pin 4 floating or merely cutting pin 4 will also work."
I'd love to harvest the parts off the broken board and use it to build one of the new PCB replacements. I actually have one around here somewhere and I've never gotten around to building it.
I think you should get a new NES replacement motherboard. I know they are pretty cheap then unsolder everything from the old motherboard and move it to the new one. Get one of the new clear plastic NES cases and build it and give it a new life! I would love to do a project like that. I just fixed my old SNES that I bought in 1992 and me and my son have been having a blast playing it I have a bunch of games (I was surprised how much some of my game sell for now!) I would love to find and old NES. I no longer have my NES but I have a bunch of my old games for it. Hey if you don't want to do it, send it to me and I will make videos doing it!
Been fixing and modding NES consoles for many years.
IPA works just as well on the PCB contacts.
Transistor 2SA937 (Q1) is where the PPU is sending the video.
I would pull the chips and build a Opentendo or something. Pop the NES CPU into a C64 would be fun.
"Displaced Gamers" on youtube goes into extreme detail about how code on the NES really works. It's my second favorite channel next to Digital Basement :)
I made an "NES in a picture frame". It's a fully functioning NES, with everything visible. I made a straight cartridge connector instead of the one that loops around, which has the PCB from an NES game (Mario 3, that I took from a broken cartridge) in it. Because of the straight connector, both boards are visible from the top side. To make the motherboard fit in the frame, I took off the RF modulator, and built a little video signal amplifier for the video signal. The motherboard is powered with 5 volts (with a USB connector). In the front of the picture frame I put the original power/reset switch board, with the buttons sticking out, and I did the same with the joystick ports. Works just like a normal NES.
I'm still impressed with the quality of the original NES - playability, durability, design, longevity - a truly great piece of consumer electronics. Thanks for sharing.
Hey, it’s TO, and he has a retro tech channel! Why am I not surprised? 😄
@@chrisjones8741 Hey Chris! yeah, I'm that kinda guy!
Build an OpenTendo! You have a donor board now with the PPU and CPU. I built one and it was a fun electronics project. Its now my main NES I play games on.
The one missing the RF module could be a good candidate to add a LumaCode mod to once they get one for the NTSC NES worked out.
this will be a good Candidate for an NES Power Module Replacement and the S-Video/RGB NES001 Mod.
I too have found these old consoles, not just the NES, "just work", unless there has been some physical damaged, broken wires, busted up from being dropped, or liquids spilled inside.
The main problem is that cartridge connecter being damaged. One time out of about 50 consoles I did find a leaky capacitor.
This video brought back memories to Christmas morning 1986 when I got an NES (with the light gun and ROB). It was defective and it would constantly flash reset when you put in a cartridge like when the CIC chip has failed.
Those boards came from my collection. I was very brutal with them because I was only interested in the sound chip/CPU. I had dreams of building an 8-bit synthesizer from them, but after a while I gave up as I dont have the time or proper tools to do it. The reason there are three was to increase the polyphony and tone options. The sound chip produces 5 voices: 2 pulse wave channels, 1 triangle wave channel, 1 noise channel, and 1 sample/PCM channel. So cool that they found their way to the Digital Basement! ❤
So why did you tear off the RF modulator box and controller ports on one of them? And so brutally?
@exidy-yt iirc, that machine had been dropped on that corner and the modulator was bent up. So I just chopped it off because I only wanted to preserve the cpu.
@@cgxone7578 Makes sense. Thank you!
We ask that you obtain a NESessity board or Opentendo and swap all the components over on camera...probably a pack of new capacitors will be recommended while you're at it...yes we've seen it on other couple of channels...but you're a real enthusiast that adds to the enjoyment of our retro community
I love seeing some NES content on here. My childhood NES from 1986 is still going strong. 😊
you may not realize it, but that small nes mobo that looked like it had an encounter with a VERY hungry caterpillar was a whole rollercoaster of emotions for the 19 minutes you handled it, that little guy lived through some stuff and is still roaring to go
"It's only a flesh wound."
The Zapper has a dedicated pin on the connector so the wire story checks out :), buttom right when looking at the front side of the console
This really is a case of they dont build them like that anymore. Goes for all electronics. In my gameroom / attic i have lots of older electronics. VCrs, CRTs, etc everything keeps working. Its the newer "retro consoles" and stuff that gives issues like the X360s, ps3 that sort of stuff that gets laser issues etc. due to all the moving parts.
Also when you look at the materials that where used, tvs and vcrs where build like a tank. The last gen vcrs where cheaper plastic already. My 40 year old Betamax vcr still works like a charm with better picture then the 15 year old newer VHS VCR. Weighs 3 times as much lol
Fantastic display of troubleshooting.
One thing you may be interested in, even if it won't be massively useful, is that certain Japanese cartridges have an extra sound chip on the cartridge(Castlevania 2 off the top of my head has 2 extra sound channels, but there's others, including a shooter by SunSoft that contains a Yamaha chip that I just can't think of the name of) and won't work on an American or PAL system because even though the pin still exists, it isn't connected. There's a mod to connect this pin back up again using bodge wires.
Most modern flash carts can emulate these chips, as any NES game made after 1987 will use expansion chips and won't play without them. In fact, I think SMB1(1985) was the last game by Nintendo themselves to not have an expansion chip, as the NES is unable to use bank switching without one and without bank switching, there is a max cart size of 40kb(32kb for program and sound data, and 8kb for graphics data) which, yeah, isn't really enough. The fact that your cart can play SMB2 shows it can emulate at least some of these functions.
CV2 was originally a Famicom Disk System game, and used the extra sound capability of that; CV3 had the VRC6 chip in the cartridge that added two extra square waves and a sawtooth wave.
Game Sack just did a video on all the FC games with expansion audio chips.
Cypher from the Matrix would be able to play that NES by looking at the video signal on the scope. "I see pipe, mushroom, mushroom, pipe"
I got a bit of PTSD from the casual "pin 4 treatment". With vintage HW I prefer non-destructive / fully reversible modifications
Someone has probably already said this, but OAM = Object Attribute Memory. It contains attributes about "objects" (essentially sprites) on the screen, i.e. the X, Y, sprite index, palette, in front of/behind background flag, and horizontal/vertical flip flag. This system was also used in the Gameboy/Gameboy Color's PPU, though with a slightly different layout to the bytes and flags.
I've cut pin 4 on the cic and my nes still works to this day.
I used to power my NES with my Atari 800 power supply too, back in the day. :D
Instead of cutting the pin, you can just solder in two wires. Safer and fully reversible.
Yep, light gun trigger and sense were a distinct input to the CPU. Triggered an interrupt vs. being read from a shift register.
On the SNES it was also wired to a pin on the PPU that latched the exact beam position, as the Super Scope, Enforcer, etc. were pixel-accurate and didn't require the blank-and-flash blocks like the NES did.
The broken board... I'd love to see you get an NESRGB (PPU interposer) and build a replacement PSU for it. There are projects out there for it, albeit not intended for this level of carnage. But, I think you could still get it back to stable, usable console! Maybe keep it to see about Lumacode when there's an NES version?
Oh! And there are CIC replacements out there. They perform the proper operations, mines the lockout functions. Inexpensive too.
Yes, you can spend a lot less and get a repo PCB to repopulate - but you will still need to find replacements for the can (the part broken off, it's the PSU, audio and video circuitry) as well as the CIC chip. Seriously though, I think it'd be pretty rad to get that board back into service.
I remember wikipedia claimed some bootleg games used to defeat the CIC chip by sending some kind of voltage spike, I wonder if that nuked it somehow? Physical damage I guess would be more likely, given how close it is to the broken part of the board.
When I made my portable NES in 2001 I removed the the RF modulator and just fed 5V from a DC-DC converter and tapped into the composite video and audio. I had to make a breadboard composite video amp (using a 2N4401) That NES with the broken off RF modulator could still work.
For the PCB with the missing section, you don't need the RF Modulator, but you do need the power supply bits and the AV out, and there are some open source replacements for that circuit. There's only a few signals that go to that area of the board, so even if it's mangled, it could be salvagable. For the weird shutdown state, try adding a large electrolytic capacitor with higher than 5v, this should prevent brownouts.
Btw, I highly recommend disabling the CIC chips. I would do the full procedure; i.e. don't leave the cut pin floating but tie it to ground.
OAM is Object Attribute Mapping. It's basically the data for each of the 64 sprites it can display each frame.
Also with a couple of resistors on the edge connector you can enable the extra sound channels that you get when running Japanese games (either via adapter or flash cart). I think it's called an "expansion audio" mod.
Also there are a few open source motherboards now, that you can reuse the old chips on.
Do not replace the 7805 with modern 5v buck converters; even if they're compatible and it seems to 'be working", they introduce a lot of noise into the circuit and can add jail bars to the video output.
For the board without the video output & power circuit box, there is an upgrade board which replaces it & offers RGB output!.
You have to really appreciate how Nintendo built this machine back in the day. Almost all off-the-shelf parts, besides the 2A03 CPU and the PPU of course, where the 2A03 is practically a 6502 with just some additional support guts and they removed the BCD mode. Which probably didn't have a lot of purpose for videogames anyway. Actually was interesting to hear about how DeoxIT is all that's needed for the cartridge pin connector though. I've replaced a few of them here and there for people, but sounds like that's wholly unnecessary, and maybe even worse not addressing the actual problem!
On the last board you made me fell so much better!!! Many times I get something working in the kludgey testing set up all day long and then connect everything like its supposed to be and now its not working!!!!
This was great (even if they are built like tanks with little to repair). Definitely interested in more console repair content. Your explanations and troubleshooting process is superior to other channels. Optical systems like PS1, Saturn have more to go wrong which I'm currently wrestling with.
You could mount the hardware inside a portable CRT monitor with some extra space inside and have a portable gaming machine.
this would be sweet to do I have an old 80s portable color crt that could totally do that
Ooh, or what about getting a TV with a built-in VCR where the VCR stopped working, and mounting the board in such a way that you stick the cartridge into the slot. I guess you'd have to replace the black piece with one that doesn't require pushing the cartridge down afterwards.
I have two Front loader NES consoles, I've had them for a while. I think I got them both "broken"; the more recent one I got at the thrift store a few years ago for a few dollars because it did not work. I cleaned things up, boiled the connectors and bent the pins back into place and they work just fine. I like bending the pins back beyond where they would normally go so games boot without even being pressed down.
The chopped motherboard must've come from Bringus Studios :D
I'm always sad by the condition of NES consoles I see online. Mine is in great shape...and I used to take it apart as a kid for fun! Still works and looks great.
On the board that's missing the RF modulator, it looks like it's also missing the 4Mhz crystal for the CIC, this is definitely an issue.
ENIG was first used in 1990, so it would not have been available to put on a 1985 console. ENEPIG would have been the best option at the time, but because it contains palladium, it was prohibitively expensive, hence HASL.
Seeing NES content here is a very welcome and pleasant surprise! It never hurts to have spares of one of the all-time best consoles, as I can attest. When I moved out of state, it was handy having my original at my parents' while having a duplicate in my apartment.
if you ever come across Nintendo consoles in the future, I recommend you running some hardware diagnostics (often called "aging tests") to determine possible edge case failures
5:57 OR alternatively you could just mod it to be RGB only, and solder in a better modern NES power board replacement.
Alternatively The part that was torn off isn't strictly necessary at least in most HDMI replacement kits.
My Xbox one with only having like 8 hour in total of use died sidently one day just being unused for about 13 month and my NES from 1989 have been without being use for more than 2 year and the thing works like the first day. Amazing how things are not built today like the 80's stuff.
Fixing The nes game console is not easy but is pure pain in the ass everytime people who tried to fix one of these nes games too-DLH
Thank you so much showing how to cut that leg, I will take out my Nintendo and do the same mod!! - Update, I cut mine and it is working great!
The CIC chip might not be bad, it just might be more sensitive to ripple/intermittent voltage drops on the 5V rail, since the bulk capacitance seems to have been in the missing modulator section (these types of crocodile clips are quite high in resistance in my experience)
38:10 the poor motherboard is hooked up in life support! 😅
It's funny I just bought my first NES as well as a Famicom, multicart, Family BASIC with keyboard, disk drive adaptor and drive emulator. Next would be to mod them and you just showed me how. Thanks..😊
yes, do not buy replacement connectors unless you want to waste money. The replacements are not build the same way and do not allow normal insert/remove of cartridges. You basically can't use the console with the top cover on. beware.
The tutorial I followed years ago told me to not leave that pin 4 floating. It will work but it may be flaky. So just use a resistor to ground it or something.
I have made a video about how pretty much any flashing NES can be fixed with deoxit. So many people bend/boil/sand the pins when all that does is damage the connector.
13:35 It's the same with audio equipment. Just clean the potentiometers and everything works.
I actually did that same CIC disable mod on my NES though I attempted to pull the pin cleanly out of the board but ended up breaking it off entirely though for a time it worked. After a few years though I went to turn on my NES and it didn't respond and testing voltage rails I at one point checked the reset line on the CPU to find it was still being held in reset and then discovered that line came from one of the pins on the CIC chip. Ideally I have read that you should ground pin 4 rather then leave it floating and maybe that is why it eventually failed on me and maybe why it failed on you as well on that one board and maybe you've just been lucky with the other ones you've done that to. I eventually just pulled another CIC chip from a game cart from a sports game I never play and replaced the bad one in my NES while grounding pin 4 to a test point I found under where the chip goes for a clean look and it's been working ever since. I can also still play that sports game if I wanted to on the CIC disabled console. Oh another thing to note is you might want to pull out the capacitor on the RF modulator. It might not be obvious but on mine and in some videos I've seen there is a tiny bit of electrolyte that had leaked on the board so I ended up replacing it with the same value but smaller one I had.
I would love to see somebody make something for that expansion port on the North American NES.
Something interesting, very early Famiclones (bootleg Famicoms and NES consoles) used a near 1 to 1 copy of the Famicom mainboard, and Pin compatible clones of the PPU and CPU, so it's possible to install genuine ICs into them.
That, or you could build your own "Nintoaster"
you should turn the broken board into a usb c powered nes with its own bootloader and put the games on an sd card. maybe even attach its own screen and make a handheld version :)
I bet that's why someone salvaged the RF modulator on that board. They tested it, CIC chip was bad, they couldn't figure it out so they just yanked the RF modulator from it for another board. They could've taken their time and done it more gently. Someone with the knowledge could build a working NES around that board, though.
When I got my NES December of 1991 the Zapper didn't work either, My dad threatened that he might have to take it back to the store. That night he took it upstairs and the adaults hooked it to the living room TV after we kids had gone to bed and guess what, Zepper worked.
So instead of taking back the NES we just had to replace the really old TV that the NES had been connected to that first day with a new TV and it worked fine.
That same NES now lives its life in my living room connected to my RetoTink 2X Pro connected through a composite switch box and then connected out to an HDMI switch box and into an OLED TV.
My later acquired NES's including my Top Loader live in my Office with some unconnected aside and my top loader connected to a CRT. and eventually one may live its life in my son's bedroom if he decides he wants one
I use my office setup for Zapper, R.O.B. and Power Glove scenarios. My Power pad lives in the living room but has not seen use in the 4 years we lived in this house yet because life hasn't allowed it.
would kinda be fun and intresting to give the broken mobo a second opportunity in life
as content, but also because everyone loves to see old beaten up, electronics working.
i know this isn't the channel, but it might be a good mobo to design a custom case and do some modding
Never seen a NES from the inside. I was expecting these motherboards to contain more chips like the C64, but it looks really sparse or low cost to me. Especially how they have soldered the RF modulator to the mainboard doesn't look state of the art.
The downside to having a parts board for a Nintendo is, good luck ever needing it!
I was a bit confused when you said you'd issues with the zapper because I had it in my head that all the signalling was done via the shift register in the controller, but there are apparently two additional data lines that don't get used by the controllers. I'm guessing it's one of these that's used to detect of the zapper registered a hit and that's what was broken in your NES.
You should definitely scavenge the parts from the damaged board to build a modern replica NES.
hey Adrian, I believe Macho Nacho covered a modern NES replacement that uses the custom chips that could be a good use for your snapped board.
You don't need to hold the game down for it to work. In fact, some cartridge ports fail in such a way that, if you press the game down, the CIC circuit stops making correct contact, but works like a charm if you keep it up. As a side note, Famicom-to-NES cartridge adaptors can only work when kept up, mainly because Famicom cartridges are too thick, so they cannot be inserted into the slot, therefore the adapters take the shape of a regular cartridge with an insert port at the top (had the game really needed to be kept down, they would have to have a weirs S shape at the top).
I'm so glad your heatsink fitted lol
Interesting. That PCB with the missing modulator would be a perfect candidate for making a nintoaster. If you go to vomitsaw's channel he made the nintoaster that AVGN uses. The video on it is super old, but it doesn't use the modulator. Since then, it's been upgraded with an HDMI mod. But in theory that particular board is perfectly fine. It just needs a little bit of help.
In Japan, a check mark is bad. It means a mistake.
If you break a multi-layer PCB like that, there is a good chance something will short between the layers.
one common fault is nes light gun or bazooka , requires a crt to function due to refresh rates etc. ,unlike the power glove which bases on ultrasonic location
NEW NES PROJECT! Get one of those new mobos and go to town!
Think that damaged board has a bit in common with my NES. Someone before me cut the IRQ trace and bridged it with a bodge wire. They didn’t realise they cut an adjacent trace making it unable to boot, just a grey screen. I eventually spotted the issue and added a 2nd wire to take care of that and it boots every time now. I haven’t defeated CIC, yet. I do have an import adaptor though
steel is not a appropiate cooling material. there's a reason why that it always made of aluminium.
some of those cartridge pushdowns have pins that are bent out of shape or have lost their retention strength. In those cases replacement is the only option
Certainly is a rather brutal amputation on that one board, but, despite its' issues, it is a survivor, may be missing parts, but it can live on in a "lightened" form... :P
Adrian if the bottom connector has the same signals as the edge connector, I’d love to find a way to finesse a top loading connector for games.
I feel bad for the last motherboard the entire rf/composite modulator was cut off :^(
The reliability of these boards is probably down to the fact that the circuit is so simple in comparison to other designs of the day like the C64 with all its custom chips. Since you don't have cases for those two boards, maybe it would be best to create mini-arcades with them. Otherwise you could go full 'Ben Heck' on them and turn them into handhelds...
Consider making a pimped out custom shell for one to allow to it come back into use. Let the rest go into the general retro parts supply channels - they will help other NES's in grave need.
databyte. what a wonderful brand name.
You need to pick up a Nintendrawer!
Yes! The ADB deoxit drinking game is alive and well! :D
35:38 it is possible that the CIC chip is good but there’s a disconnected pin on it due to the chunk of missing PCB.
Make an NES picture frame like the cork board job from a few years back, only hook it up to a multi game cart and a power source. That way you'd have a cool pcb picture frame you could hang that could serve as a working NES. 😂
Maybe try to assemble a fully functional, hacked together NES just using parts you have laying around? Maybe use the board that has a chunk missing. Basically just freestyle a solution to get something reliable that works as a complete console. It could kinda be like the C64 episodes where you repaired the boards with just a basic set of tools.
Opentendo board for sure.
It's not quite true that disabling the CIC by cutting a pin grants perfect playability of all cartridges. Any official and modern carts will be fine, but some old pirate carts would use a voltage spike to stun the CIC and with the pin cut, that voltage spike can be passed to other components instead.
Disabling the CIC also affects the reset button since the CIC sits between the reset button and the reset circuit, but there is a different fix that cross-connects two pins to bypass the CIC's ability to reset the console and leaves the reset button free to function while leaving the CIC otherwise functional.
The bottom expansion connector I believe also has some of the connections from the Famicom controller expansion port
I noticed that (well it looks like; not sure if the power was actually being sent) you snipped the leg of that CIC chip with the power still connected? Perhaps that led to its demise?
That broken One, strip it down and make a handheld NES like Ben Heck has done with various console/computers.
Am I the only one who thinks that we need to save that left for dead board? Given how much love the Plexus received, and this seems much simpler, would it not be cool to restore it to it's former glory despite the abuse it's been thru?
I mean, it's kind of what Adrian does on this channel. Never forget the "left for dead" C64. Or all the Tandy repairs. Or the SWTP system. Or the banged-up Macintoshes. Or all the misbehaving Amigas...
@@pragmax Teehee, naughty Amiga.
The Plexus was a rare, maybe even one of a kind machine. Used NESes are everywhere.
@@exidy-yt Thanks for stating the obvious.
@@exidy-yt agree, not a fair comparison. I was simply saying I loved the attention the Plexus got and would love to see this nes board get to live again. I get it ,Adrian's got a lot in his backlog, and this would most likely not be on top, but still... call me nostalgic