I'm in the 2nd phase of my NES synth. Does anyone know if it's possible to buy bare 2A03 chips? Desoldering them by hand from NESs is a pain, and all the Nintendo Repair Centers in my area won't sell them because they need to use them to repair consoles (understandably).
jarek wrote:
all the Nintendo Repair Centers in my area won't sell them because they need to use them to repair consoles (understandably).
Do they still repair them?!?
In the NYC area, there are still 2 Nintendo Repair Centers that claim to repair them, at least they gave that impression when I called to ask if I could buy the chips. They said 'We need them to repair consoles'.
I have maybe 8 NES systems that are missing the CPU. So if you are able to find more than enough NES CPUs, I'd be interested in getting some also. There is an arcade repair shop that sells 2A03s, I could look it up if you can't find it. I was only able to order 2, so I don't know if that was all they had or if it's a limit.
Actually if you look on digchip.com, there are places that claim to have it. Buyer beware though. I ordered some other ASICs by a reference from them, naturally going with the cheapest quote. I got real chips, brand new, but 8 out of 10 of the ten I tested didn't work right, heh. Surely there are better deals to be had through there, though.
they aren't that hard to desolder a heat gun helps a lot
I could desolder and sell you a 2a07 (PAL CPU) if you want, but i guess you would rather have a 2a03
hyarion, thanks for the offer, but ntsc chips are what I'm going for. I've tried heatgunning them, but I guess I'm doing it wrong? There don't seem to be any tutorials online about how to heatgun a 40 pin DIP chip.
memblers, is this the site you mentioned?
http://www.arcadecomponents.com/customroms.html 9 bucks seems a bit steep for the chip, but I guess it also comes with the guarantee that it works.
Nope, it was here:
http://mikesarcade.com/cgi-bin/store.pl?sku=RP2A03. But it looks like they upped the price considerably since then (to $25)!
$9 isn't too bad really, it's going to be really hard to find a 2A03 for less than the whole system costs. If you want to find a Nintendo arcade PCB that uses it, it will be socketed on there. Donkey Kong 3 has 2 of them (meanwhile it's game code runs in a Z80, heh), Punchout, VS Unisystem, Playchoice. But these are the oldest revisions I think, difference is that it doesn't have the 'looped noise' feature.
I can desolder one, but I'll need another system (to add to the pile).
A couple years back I bought fifty or so from Mikesarcade to use in an eventual 2A03 synth. I'm not sure what the price hike is about. $25 is 500% of the old price.
Recently I've seen either the G or H version for $0.75 from "black market" distributors like digchip, but all my correspondence with them has been dubious at best. I'm tempted to buy a second NES, replace the 2A03 with a 40-pin ZIF socket, and use it to test a pile of black market chips.