I am asking myself why Nintendo (and 3rd party developers of Famicom cartridges) used almost exclusively through-holes components in NES carts : Except the MMC3, MMC4, MMC5 and MMC6 chips, and the SRAM chip in the extremely rare HVC-UNROM-04 board, all components in production cartridges are through-holes.
(I'm excluding epoxy blobs carts because that's yet a completely different technology)
Not that this is bad in any way, but by using surface mounted SRAMs and 74xx logic circuits, they could have reduced the PCB area and production costs, as in seen in this UNROM-compatible board with the same area as a NROM board that Memblers made.
As far I understand the only real advantage of through-hole is that it is easier for soldering, measuring and routing, but there is few real advantages for production batches.
(I'm excluding epoxy blobs carts because that's yet a completely different technology)
Not that this is bad in any way, but by using surface mounted SRAMs and 74xx logic circuits, they could have reduced the PCB area and production costs, as in seen in this UNROM-compatible board with the same area as a NROM board that Memblers made.
As far I understand the only real advantage of through-hole is that it is easier for soldering, measuring and routing, but there is few real advantages for production batches.