Well over a year ago I found some old NES games at my mother in law's house. Cleaned them up, and now they work great (on my own NES, which is still in great shape). Just obtained a NES from her house, too. I got a 72 pin connector, perhaps prematurely, to refurbish it. The darn thing can't even get power. The power connector itself looks very corroded. So...is this a lost case or do you think I could resuscitate it by switching out the power connector (somehow..?). I'm considering just tearing out the hardware and turning it into an emulation PC if it really is broken.
If its just a rusty power plug de-soldering the plug and putting a new one on will fix it, one that fits well enough in the NES can be found at radioshack. More exact replacements can be got online, I forget the exact size. You can try to remove the rust with sos, sandpaper or whatever you might get it going that way.
I tried using the same cleaning technique I use successfully on cartridges on the (very corroded) power connector. It looks pretty shiny now, but I still get no power. I wonder if I should just pronounce this one dead and go head and make this into an emu pc? Then, when my working NES dies, I'll have something that at least looks real...haha
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that's such a waist, do you have a multimeter?
No I don't...and yes I agree, I would much rather get it working again than ripping it apart and turning it into an emu pc. I'm willing to bet that not all the components are broken. However I don't have the know-how, at present, to diagnose a problem at that level.
I don't have a real nes anymore (sold them before moving to japan) so if you're going to transform it into an emu-pc: send it to me and I will try to figure out how to make it work
Just joking. I'm in the same boat as you, don't know how to fix those things yet. Still, I would like to find back a real nes someday. They're kind of rare in japan
peppers wrote:
that's such a waist, do you have a multimeter?
What would you suggest I try if I were to obtain a multimeter?
The only electronics experience I have is a bit of soldering/desoldering. If I could learn a bit about how to test what component is bad, I'm pretty certain I could go from that to actually fixing this NES.
There are two (three) great places to test given a multimeter.
1- (testable by swapping with another NES) Does the wall transformer work?
2- Does that power get in? (This is the 5 silver dots that connect the RF modulator to the main PCB, also the 5 pins on the blue connector on the side)
3- Does the voltage regulator work? (This is the black boxy object attached to the RF modulator, labeled 7805 or such)
After that, however, I'd just give up. Further failures may be simple, but require a lot more preexisting knowledge to find and fix.
lidnariq wrote:
There are two (three) great places to test given a multimeter.
1- (testable by swapping with another NES) Does the wall transformer work?
2- Does that power get in? (This is the 5 silver dots that connect the RF modulator to the main PCB, also the 5 pins on the blue connector on the side)
3- Does the voltage regulator work? (This is the black boxy object attached to the RF modulator, labeled 7805 or such)
After that, however, I'd just give up. Further failures may be simple, but require a lot more preexisting knowledge to find and fix.
I used the same AC adapter on this NES as with my working NES, so that rules out #1. It looks like if I could obtain a multimeter, I should try 2 and 3. Could you point me to a good online resource for the proper way to use a multimeter? What would I be looking for... "life?" or a specific voltage?
Here is a kind of basic tutorial (I think the one I got included a sheet like this):
http://mechatronics.mech.northwestern.edu/design_ref/tools/multimeter.html
If you look at the regulator there will be 3 pins, there's an input, ground, and output. The output should be somewhere close to 5V DC. Also, visually inspect the electrolytic capacitors and make sure they didn't blow up. Though the NES seems fairly resistant to power supply problems. It'll run with almost any AC adapter that fits the plug, AC or DC output regardless of polarity.
Obviously the power connector itself can also be damaged since it was corroded. You would want to check both connections on it for conductivity. Looking over everything and checking for visible damage also may give you a clue as to what is broken.
Have any of you fixed a problem in a NES like this before? I'm not much of a hardware guy, but I may be willing to pay someone to try to fix this. Maybe we could work something out where I pay you for your trouble regardless of whether it gets fixed, but you get a bonus on top if is restored. PM me if you're interested.
I fixed (or rather, was shown how to fix) an FC clone and an SNES clone, blown 7805 regulators in both cases. Also the FC clone's capacitor had suffered catastrophic failure (exploded confetti all over the inside of the case). But those were both caused by reversed-polarity on the power supply, and the NES is protected from that.
If just no power and the wall wart is good, I'd test the V-reg first. You can use a lamp light from some holiday ornaments or a spare set of headphones. CAREFULLY place one line on the pin farthest to the right, looking from the front (the side with all the labels and the philips screw head visible), and the other side against the heatsink (big metal thing it's screwed into).
Using the ghetto method (headpoones) to test it, you'd place the tip on the far-right pin, and the base on the headsink. A speaker on the heaphones should make a scratching noise.
Of couse in any testing, if you short the right pin and the heatsink directly, you pretty much fried the vreg...Thankfully they're somewhat readily available from rat shack.