How thick should my cartridge PCB's be? I think I read somewhere that 54 mils was standard the thickness of an NES cart, but the fab I want to use only offers 60 and 47.
Does anyone have experience with this? Is 47 mils too thin to make a good connection? Is 60 mils thick enough to damage the slot connector?
Some of my NES cartridges have thicker boards than others. I'd err on the size of big.
For example, Battle Kid Fortress of Peril is thicker than Battletoads, and Battletoads is thicker than Slalom. Some of the thicker boards make a strong connection to my replacement cartridge connector and the cartridge doesn't even need to be pushed down.
With my random analog calipers (only actually accurate to 10mil, I don't have a venier) and a CNROM-256-05 board, I'm seeing around ~52mils; thickness without the traces is ~47mil so trace thickness seems to be ~2mil per side (which seems to be ~1.5oz copper).
Slightly too thick boards will probably make the spring contacts gently bend towards too loose for other games (EDIT: fix homonym, defer to memblers). A too thin board may never make contact.
60 mils will ruin the NES connector. It's especially bad for top-loaders. You only have to use a Game Genie a lot to find that out. But all the boards I've made are 47 mils, and I've never heard any complaints (Squeedo rev2 was used in hundreds of MidiNES cartridges).
When I measured Nintendo's boards before it came out to be 45 mils. I suppose it could vary a little.