I recently found a toploader for sale. Is it worth buying? I have a toaster style NES, but it's on the other side of the country in California right now. It's also pretty old, and requires a lot of twiddling to get games to run on it. I was going to have it shipped to me, but I could get this toploader instead. Now from what I understand, the toploaders are a lot less finicky then the toasters, but I've also heard the graphics aren't as good, due to vertical lines every 8 pixels or so. How bad are these lines? I haven't found any screenshots online of them. From what I can tell no one has found a way to fix them either, but I could be wrong. I know the toploader only does RF, but I'm okay with that. Thanks for any advice or experience you guys have had with toploaders.
Front loaders are fine, just buy a new 72 pin connector off ebay for $5, or take it out and use De-Ox on it, and clean it.
I bought a toploader and have not been happy with it. The RF only is a pain for me, but it sounds like it's not an issue for you. The vertical lines are extremely noticeable, and hence I never play games on the toploader. However, I do quite a bit of hardware hacking and the toploader is good for that because:
1. It does not have a lockout chip on it, meaning neither do my games.
2. You can put a EEPROM'd cart into it without having to tear the thing apart. (actually I use a somewhat rare "game genie extender" for this).
If you can get a toploader (especially with it's original controllers) for cheap, it's worth it IMHO. The redesigned Famicom is said to be a lot better, though (A/V out, no lines, NES controller ports, but 60-pin cart connector).
If using RF doesn't bother you, having the vertical lines can't make it much worse, heheh. I think they were very visible in black or darker screens, but not as much on some games.
In my opinion, the more complex the background, the less noticeable the vertical lines become. Solid color backgrounds will display them in all their glory.
I am looking for that rarest of creatures, the NES A/V Toploader. It does exist, produced in limited quantities. It was designed to fix the top loader's vertical line issue. It uses the Multi-Out of the SNES and later consoles, replacing the RF adapter within the toploader. Nintendo has replaced some toploaders when the customers complained about the lines. The also released a few in the marketplace at the very end of the NES's life. I have yet to see one come up for auction, but I will pay a very high price for one. Then I will donate it to the community to see whether the top loading NES's problem can be solved. I would suggest that an AV Famicom would work just as well, and I already have that.
Great Hierophant wrote:
In my opinion, the more complex the background, the less noticeable the vertical lines become. Solid color backgrounds will display them in all their glory.
I am looking for that rarest of creatures, the NES A/V Toploader. It does exist, produced in limited quantities. It was designed to fix the top loader's vertical line issue. It uses the Multi-Out of the SNES and later consoles, replacing the RF adapter within the toploader. Nintendo has replaced some toploaders when the customers complained about the lines. The also released a few in the marketplace at the very end of the NES's life. I have yet to see one come up for auction, but I will pay a very high price for one. Then I will donate it to the community to see whether the top loading NES's problem can be solved. I would suggest that an AV Famicom would work just as well, and I already have that.
Does such a thing exist in new mint in box from factory condition? I bet somebody could hardware mod a NES toploader to make it A/V. Then again, you could mod a toaster NES to make it a toploader. If you do get your hands on such a mythical beast, take care of it... but don't be a wuss: USE IT TOO!
Jagasian wrote:
Then again, you could mod a toaster NES to make it a toploader.
This is possible. Cut pin 4 of the lockout chip, rotate the front end up by 90 degrees, and put it on a stand.
I have the idea of making replacement NESs. What it would be is a nearly complete compact system. The PCB would look like the top loaders but it would be almost fully populated with the ordinary RAM and logic chips. There would be sockets for the CPU and PPU. That way the user could obtain his own chips and put them in or replace them if one goes bad. Also, the PPU socket could be used for a Playchoice 10 PPU for RGB output. (A dipswitch would choose between the 2C02 and the 2C03.)
The only question is how do you get NES chips? Unless you can find a good supply of vintage chips, it won't work, right? Well, you will have to sacrifice front loaders for the chips. In an optional service, one can have the chips desoldered by a machine to ensure no damage to the chips.
If I was ever to acquire a genuine AV NES Top Loader, I would donate it to the community so that we can discover whether we can use it to fix the vertical line problem on the RF NES Top Loaders (because the AV Top Loader doesn't suffer from that problem.) I wonder if a Famicom AV would work just as well.
It would be interesting to have a bunch of PCBs and plastic top-loader style cases made, so that we could harvest toasters and player's choice 10 boards for chips. But making plastic parts is expensive in small quantities and tearing apart classic console hardware is somewhat of a bad thing, IMO. It is better to just refurbish toasters, and mod RF famicoms and USA top loaders to have AV.
Modding a NES to have RGB is allot harder than you'd think, even with the right chip:
http://nfg.2y.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=187
I have used the toploader for quite a while. I found mine in the trash down the street along with a Super Nintendo. However I do not have the new style controller for it, I use the old square controllers. The lines are not bad the the picture is kind of faded or washed out. I still have trouble getting the games to start on it.
I did get my old front loaders going better by taking the contacts out and cleaning them. The same goes for the game contacts. When I cleaned the games alot of dust, dirt, and corrosion came off. Some that would not work started working again.
However, I would not pay alot for the toploader. Remember one of the main reasons they are on ebay is because when someone has something and hears it is valuable, they demand high prices and people will believe anything.
I did not know what it was at first when I found it, so when I looked it up online, I was surprised it was worth so much. In retrospect I am quite surprised I found mine in the trash. That seems like one of the last places to find one, and along with an SNES!!
Jagasian wrote:
I bet somebody could hardware mod a NES toploader to make it A/V.
Yes, this has been done. I used the online guide to mod my top-loader to include A/V. Sadly enough, it has no effect on making the vertical bars issue go away. Still, it's better than being stuck with RF I suppose.
Toploader wrote:
I still have trouble getting the games to start on it.
It probably needs a cleaning. You did find it in the trash, ya lucky bastid.