Acquiring and restoring the NES

I managed to get through my preteen years NESless only by playing with my cousin's console and borrowing it to my home. After a few years, I still couldn't get one because at one point its production seased, but that didn't stop me.

I got my first NES at the age of 18, after a friend of mine wanted some space in his closet, so he wanted to threw away all his "junk". Some of his so called "junk" was a NES in box, with 10 complete games (with manuals and boxes) and 2 controllers. He called me, as he knew I was a Nintendo enthusiast, and I immediately ran to his house to pick it up.

The Super Mario Bros. title screen

Oh, the joy. I went back to my home, hooked it up the TV and fired it up with Super Mario Bros cart inside. Flashing screen. Well, I thought, time for some old school cartridge blowing. I blowed at the contacts and after a while, and some cartridge moving in the slot, it worked. The title screen of the game was on my TV.

I tested all the games (SMB 1, 2 & 3, Zelda, Top Gun, Gradius, Rad Racer -glasses included-, Double Dragon III, Tetris and Snake Rattle & Roll), everything worked with some effort.

Time for some spring cleaning, I thought.

Armed with my Philips head screwdriver I "operated" the NES and reached the 72-pin connector. It was dirty and most of the pins where bent to the inside. I cleaned it using contact cleaning spray and with a toothpick I bent the pins back to their original state. The work was done! The NES played all the games like new.

Pull this pin off the board and bye-bye lockout chip

Next task was to region-free the console. I searched a bit on Google and found that all I had to do was to unsolder a pin from the region lock out chip. So easy. Borrowed a NTSC game from a friend (I'm European-PAL) and worked like a charm! Also with the lock out chip disabled the games booted up easier and the screen blinking stopped.

The final step was to refurbish the controllers. The A & B buttons on one of the controllers didn't "click" when pressed and felt wrong. I ordered a NES controller repair kit and after installing it, the controllers worked like out-the-box.

With the NES 100% restored, I started looking for games to extend my collection. I now have about 60 games for the console and I try to buy one game each month. Some of the duplicate games I have (I bought some cartridge lots at one time) are listed on eBay for sale (http://www.ebay.com/sch/iron2184/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_from=&_ipg=).

That sums up my meeting with the NES and the start of my collection. Hope you enjoyed my
sort story. The next post is on its way.

See you soon

-NES Cat