Tonight, I disassembled my old NES so that I could clean it and maybe make it work more reliably. I boiled the 72-pin connector in a pot of water because someone on the Internet said that helps and because I don’t have any contact cleaner. I understand that bending the pins also helps. I probably will not bother doing that unless it still doesn’t work well after the connector dries.
Because I’m cleaning the console itself, I’m also cleaning the games (with cotton swabs and glass cleaner). To be thorough, I’m taking them apart. I’ll probably become too impatient to do this for all of them, but I think it’s fun to see what they look like inside.
When I opened up some NES games before, years ago, Gyromite was the simplest and Dragon Warrior 4 was the most complex of those I looked inside. Unfortunately, I later lost Gyromite and someone stole Dragon Warrior 4.
one of the neat things about the NES compared to almost all other cartridge hardware is that what’s actually inside each of the games varies a lot because of all the different memory mappers, it’s not just expensive storage media, if you have a dozen games there’s a decent chance no two will be alike
FUN FACT: Some early NES carts were just reprogrammed famicom cart boards with a 60-to-72-pin adapter stuck on. Not even soldered, just friction fit and mounted into the cart. You can snag yourself a cheap Fami-to-NES converter this way if you know where to look.
I love this thread but part of my old millennial lizard brain is horrified that someone would bust open a NES cartridge, clearly an object of immense material value
I love the photos. Several years ago I bought a craigslist lot of 40+ NES games and this takes me back to disassembling and cleaning them one by one over a weekend.
Whoa, did people actually replace the batteries in their cartridges? It’s occurring to me that I have a dim memory of an uncle of mine doing this for his kid’s copy of The Adventure of Link???
I’ve never had a battery die in any of my old carts but for the longest times my GBA games would spontaneously wipe themselves. Though I don’t think those used batteries?
The vast majority of power expended in digital circuits occurs when logic gates travel between the voltage for 0 and 1 and vice versa (this is why computers get hotter when you overclock them). I’m pretty sure the same is true with SRAM chips, such as the ones on the Zelda cart. Thus, the backup RAM only saps a very small trickle from the battery when not in use.
Also, as the battery gets drained its voltage drops slightly. My intuition tells me that the SRAM can store data just fine when undervolted (to a point). However, that same intuition also tells me that might accelerate the rate of battery drain and also increase the chances of bitrot in the save data (maybe).
I had my Zelda 1, FF 1, and Crusader of Centy’s batts die on me. It happens apparently. Zelda just lost its save at random and then worked for awhile then lost another. Its kinda maddening.
If you want to replace the battery but don’t want to lose your save do you have to do like open heart surgery where it’s like plugged in to a powered console while you do the swap?
