I am currently looking to buy a batch (~5) of 2A03s, revision G, for reverse-engineering purposes. Is there an easier way than buying single consoles and ripping out the chips? Because that would mean tremendous shipping costs, me being located in PAL territory.
Try digchip.com, doing a search for RP2A03G turns up some in stock. I have no clue who has those chips, if they're new, pulls, or bad/fake chips, and what price they want to sell them for. One of them claims 25k in stock and date code '09', which is clearly BS. Submit a quote and find out if you want. But I don't think there will be many options besides pulling them from systems.
It looks like those are mostly suspicious China-based IC traders.
Anyway, I have gone for the tedious option of bidding on sufficiently many NES units on the free market. Unfortunately, most of them come with extra parts (cables, connectors, accessories, games) I am not interested in. Shipping all of these individually to Europe would incur quite the cost.
So I am looking for someone in the US with basic solderings skills who would be willing to have 5-10 units shipped to them, desolder the CPUs, and ship them in a single small international package to Europe.
In addition to negotiable monetary compensation for efforts and expenses, all the stuff aside from the CPUs could be kept.
Please post in this thread or PM me.
I KNOW theres people with nos from old nintendo repair stores....but try getting them to sell you chips is gonna be a bitch. I suspect the digikey chips might be arcade versions....they lack looped audio or some shit like that.
have you searched european auction sites?
here you have 5 units for ~61euro from sweden:
http://www.tradera.com/5-st-NES-8-Bit-N ... _102518065 (they are sold as defect units but it's probably just bad connectors)
don't know if they want to ship outside sweden but if you are interested i can could buy them, desolder and ship the CPU's where ever you want
hyarion wrote:
have you searched european auction sites?
Great! I did not know there were NTSC units in the EU. I have sent you a PM.
Still looking for someone in the US to desolder the CPUs from the units I bought there, though (desoldering is easy!). I cannot believe it would be so hard to find someone. Just name a price!
if you're not able to find anyone else, i could give it a shot. i don't have a specific desoldering station on hand, but i've got a decent Metcal setup and am quite ok with soldering. feel free to PM/contact me if needed.
-justin.
I'm interested in helping also. I have a vacuum desolderer, and am curious about testing something with different mainboard revisions, so it would be worth it for me just to have the parts. I have 3 kind of intermittent-working CopyNES's I need to fix up, so I already have some loose CPUs if it helps much for choosing them.
i've suggested to dfrechet that he might be better off working with you if possible, though i'd be happy to help if needed.