These games together cost only 10 bucks! What a fuckin' steal! I was extremely happy with my purchase and also found a copy of Shadows of the Damned that works...I didn't get to pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw (yes, I am getting that game and I'm not ashamed) but that's alright. Overall, this was a great little trip! Upon getting home I cracked a beer and threw in Double Dragon, fully prepared to have to work a little bit to get the game to function because hey, that's what NES cartridges are known for. Double Dragon, however, didn't work at all...a little disappointing, but I decided to just leave it for a while and try again.
With a LOT of patience and slight movements and jostling, I got A Boy and His Blob to work. You know, it's a really cool game with a really sweet gameplay mechanic...but I have to say I like the remake of it on the Wii much, much better overall. Anyway, I was playing ABaHB, and the moment before I encountered the final boss...the game stopped functioning and crapped out. IMMENSE FRUSTRATION!
I was irritated...but I tried Double Dragon again thinking it would work this time. It didn't. This is when I started thinking about finally cracking open my poor old NES and doing some tune ups and maintenance. The bastard's at least 23 years old, after all, and for a gaming machine to still be able to function after that many years is pretty damn impressive...it deserves the care and attention, and I really would love to be able to get a game to work after just a few tries, rather than a few dozen...or a few hundred.
My partners in crime.
Yesterday (Saturday) was amazing outside, weatherwise! The whole week has been...and so what better activity to do than to gather materials and sit indoors fixing a classic video game system? After investigating some seemingly simple tutorials on the 'net and YouTube, I took a walk around the neighbourhood to pick up some rubbing alcohol, safety pins, a cheap toothbrush, and Q-Tips. My objectives were as follows:
- Get that bastard open and learn how its guts are laid out. Despite all these years, I have never opened up my NES because I've always been paranoid of damaging it. I am notorious for destroying things when I am attempting to fix them...and since we're talking about opening my most precious video game system, I was extremely nervewracked.
- Repair the pins in the 72-pin contact connector within the system. I can explain this process more later, but here's the basic idea. The circuit connectors on the cartridge slide into a 72-pin connector within the system. When these connections are bridged, data and information can transfer between the cartridge and console. As such, if the connections aren't very good, the game won't function well. The pin connectors inside the console, however, are designed to bend...but they're not spring-loaded so they don't always bend back into position. After years of putting in cartridges and removing them, the connectors in the system are bound to get pushed down too far and be harder to align with the cartridge, which is what makes it so damn hard to get the games to work.
- Clean out any dirt and crap within the console. Since I've had this thing for so long and hadn't opened it up, I expected there to be a lot of dust bunnies thriving within the NES ecosystem. Oddly enough, my console was remarkably clean and I didn't find nearly as much dust as I thought I would!
- If all of this didn't work as well as I wanted it to, my final objective was to clean the cartridges. It's as simple as taking a Q-Tip, dipping it in rubbing alcohol, and rubbing it along the connectors of the circuit board that are exposed at the bottom of the cartridge. It cleans off a lot of gunk which can also be a connection-breaking issue.
- And finally, cry like a bitch when I have destroyed my system and games in my futile effort to repair it.
With my plan laid out, I grabbed my Phillips screwdriver and got to it...yep, that's all you need to open an NES! I shot some pictures so the world can see exactly what sick, twisted things I did to my poor baby.
This first photo shows the top of the outer casing removed. There are 6 screws holding it on, and removing them was pretty simple...so far so good, right? Underneath that top cover we have an inner case, as well as some exposed circuitry at the side. For the next step, I removed the large, silver casing to gain access to my NES' sweet, sweet innards.
Held on by 7 screws, that silver inner shell appears to only be for protection and support. I've heard you can leave this thing out if you want...but I'm not the kind of person to do that, so I put it back on when I was done. After removing this part, the cartridge loading slot is now visible as well as more of the circuitry and other connections. At the far end of the cartridge loader, you can see the 72-pin connector...so the next step was to get rid of that pesky loading slot!
Six more screws to get rid of that thing...two of which were longer, and so I had to be sure to remember which ones they belong in. With the cartridge loader out of the way, we can now see the 72-pin connector clearly, but it's attached to that bigass circuit board underneath...which means it also has to be removed if you want to get the 72-pin out. It was only held down by 2 screws in the top right corner, oddly enough...but I was still super careful because if any portion of this board was damaged, it could spell doom.
And so here's the 72- pin connector. It came off of the circuit board with a bit of a hard tug, which at first made me a little bit nervous...but everything seemed okay afterwards. Looks sorta like a dorky harmonica, doesn't it? The first thing I did to this bad boy was take that cheap toothbrush (not my own, although if I were to share my toothbrush with anyone it would probably be my NES), dip it in rubbing alcohol, and scrub those little metal teeth! I just polished them right up, removing any crap that may have accumulated on them over the years. I also took some rubbing alcohol and wiped down the internal connectors on the circuit board directly under where I removed the 72 pin connector from, to ensure that the connection there was nice and clean.
The next part was the tedious part, and this is where a safety pin (or any small, thin object really) comes in handy. There are two rows of connectors...the top ones seen here are obviously way easier to get at, because the bottom pins are all deep within those little holes at the bottom. With a pin bent to form an L-shape, you can shove the pointy end underneath all of these little connectors on the top row and actually lever them back out toward the middle a little bit. These are the connectors I mentioned earlier that, like the nerds that use them, become depressed when they're pushed around too much. Raising them all back to their original position is tedious work that requires patience, but it will absolutely make the bridge between your games and the system much more stable. I only messed around with the top, easy-to-reach connectors...but if you really wanted to go for the bottom ones you could reach back behind with your pin and get at them. Maybe put some music on or something though...Okay, so after about half an hour of highly-skilled safety pin manipulation, the connecting pins were all raised up a bit...time to put this bitch back together enough to test out some games! Initially, I didn't see much of a difference. The first game I tried was Double Dragon and I still couldn't get it to work, although I found that games that already started up pretty quick were much more stable and didn't glitch out...ever. This was an improvement, but it wasn't quite as good as I wanted because I decided that I don't want to tear this poor system apart more often than is required. I decided I would clean the cartridges with the system left open, in case cartridge cleaning made no difference and I still had to mess around with the guts of this beautiful, gray beast.
This process for cartridge cleaning is simple...dip a Q-Tip in alcohol and rub those connecting pins on the cartridges down. Some of these games (mostly the ones I got from stores way later, rather than from my original collection) had tons of gunk on them. When you rub down the connecting board on the cartridge, your Q-Tip turns black if there's a lot of stuff on it. Pretty gross...and I actually found a shitload of this stuff on my copies of Crystalis, Dragon Spirit, and Dragon Warrior as well as my new cartridges of A Boy and his Blob and Double Dragon (what's with all the "dragon" games being so messy...)! I'd like to mention that Crystalis and Dragon Warrior were games that I would basically leave completely in place once I got them working, for fear I wouldn't be able to start them again...and Dragon Spirit never really worked to begin with. My grandfather got it randomly for me off of eBay, and I think I only managed to make it function once and for about ten minutes.
This looks a lot more raunchy than it really is.
After scouring the shit out of these cartridges, I used a dry Q-Tip on each to dry them off a bit and left them near the window for a little while to let the breeze dry out the rubbing alcohol. With my system's guts still half-hanging out...it was time to try things again. I threw in Double Dragon, and here's a photo of what happened:
BAM! Look at that! First goddamn try after cleaning it off!! I couldn't believe how well it worked. I went through the rest of my collection, trying out games. If they didn't work after 5 tries at most, I would clean the cartridges and re-try them. A good majority of my games now work on the first try, and the ones that don't only need to be retried about 5 times rather than 50! I was actually blown away that this not only worked amazingly, but also that a total klutz like myself managed to go through the process without busting my NES!Finally, I fired up A Boy and his Blob again. No graphical errors, no crapping out on the last screen of the game...everything ran smoothly. Double Dragon still runs well too, though sometimes it needs a bit of repositioning...but that's different for every system really and I have no qualms with that, as long as a game stays functioning once it's in place. I got to the first instance of double Abobo, and then got my ass handed to me so I'll have to come back to it!
Lessons to be learned from this:
1) Don't be scared to mess around with your NES! If an idiot like myself can do it without buggering something up, anyone can.
2) Clean your games out! I actually cannot stress this enough...cleaning all that gross shit out of my games clearly made a massive difference, so it's worth it to clean your cartridges' connections every so often, even if it's just once a year or something like that.
3) Take your cartridges out of your system when you're done playing! Leaving them in causes the connecting pins to depress and stay in that position, making a connection between the NES and your cartridges harder to achieve. If you pull your games out when you're done playing, these pins will likely spring back to where they were and remain in their proper place for much, much longer.
4) When a midget asks to be spanked, be sure to use a 12-foot canoe oar in order to maximize OH NEVERMIND THAT ONE.
Even after all of this was complete...I had one more thing I needed to try out. Earlier this year, my copy of Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island seemed to have bit the dust. I've never seen any of my SNES games mess up before, so it really caught me off guard. Graphical glitches were all over the place, my save games were all wiped out (this includes my ORIGINAL save from when I first got the game back in '95) and the game would freeze or make the Yo'ster randomly fall through the ground...pretty much rendering it unplayable. I originally had tried to clean the connectors on it using Windex, since I had read that it was as good as rubbing alcohol for game cartridges and I was, quite frankly, too lazy to leave the house to get rubbing alcohol. I had every reason to think it would work and Windex was around, so I Q-Tipped it and gave it a shot.
No dice, the game was still all fucked up. HOWEVER:
*sniffle*
It's working again after yesterday. Rubbing alcohol FTW. I seriously was so happy that I could get Yoshi's Island functioning again...it's one of my absolute favourite platformers, and to lose it for good would have actually really made me upset. I was fully prepared for it still be broken after cleaning it...but it all worked out, and now I have one of my dearest games working again.
TAKE CARE OF YOUR SHIT, PEOPLE. Respect your possessions and they will last much, much longer than you would think. A busted NES is not trash, and with a little bit of ambition and the magic of the Interwebs, you can repair that amazing classic system and continue to have fun with it. Who knows...maybe mine'll still work in another 23 years?
Take it easy everyone! I'm giving Xenoblade a rest for the weekend to enjoy some sweet, sweet classics!
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