Hacker News Reader

Comment by aristus | Hacker News Reader

As a wee lad in the last millennium I was an authorized Nintendo repairman.

Blowing on the cart sometimes worked, if there was errant dust or fluff in the way. But in the long run the salty moist air would cause a corrosive layer of gunk on the contacts. Normal procedure was to open each cart and clean them with a good eraser then an alcohol wash.

The bigger problem was bad design in the original NES. The cart plugged into a component that looked like a harmonica and then pressed downwards, levering against a pretty heavy spring. This perpendicular stress caused the contacts to break, first causing contact flakiness, then failure. The SuperNES and GameBoy fixed this problem with a vertical insertion that carried over into the N64 and others.

View on HN

Enlightening, thanks for sharing!

I was about 8 years old, and convinced a local video store in my small town that I could repair Nintendo games. I brought them home, and if they were indeed not working, I would get a Q-tip, apply some rubbing alcohol, and swab/scrub the contacts. This nearly worked every time.

I got slightly called out when a customer brought in an actual Nintendo that was broken. I ended up taking it home, opening it up, turning it on (probably not the best idea), and went through each component on the board to see if anything looked out of place. I ended up finding a capacitor that was a bit bent, so I straightened it out with my fingers and, viola! It worked! I returned the Nintendo back to the shop in working order and felt like quite the little man.

I had free game and movie rentals for life, as well as being able to pick out what Nintendo games the store was to order next. I was in gaming heaven.

It was a family business so I wasn't much older than that. :) It's amazing what children can do if you don't tell them it's too hard.

Let me pedantic while being clueless at the same time, the western NES design introduced the problem, since the original famicom had vertical insertion cartridge already right ?

In Russia we had so-called Dendy[1] (hardware clone of Famicom made in Zelenograd) which had that exact vertical slot. Guess what, we used to blow into our cartridges too when they didn't work.

[1] Actually, history of game consoles in Russia in early 1990s is quite curious. Nintendo themselves weren't interested in our market, so Russian-Chinese manufacturers promoted their clone quite freely. I believe it was even better than original famicom, since original controllers were detachable and easily replaced and also it came with a lightgun. Cartridges were cheap and abundant, about $2-4 each. Also there was a lot of 10-in-1 (100-in-1 even) catridges. After SEGA released their mega drive 2 console in Russia, dendy business started to decline. Look at this pic: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Dendy%27s... Ridiculous bottom-left cartridge with the picture of Morpheus from the Matrix and hilariously named FBI was clearly released in 1999 or later. Anyways, all our favorites were the same with the rest of the world: mario, contra, battle city (this one was a real hit! everyone had it). Ah, sweet times.

Thanks I never heard about Russian market and that you were left without original NES ! I only knew about few South America clones.

Ah, my Family Game, how many hours did I invest in it while growing up? Those "999 in 1" cartridges were awesome :)

What about Rush'n'Attack? Did Cold War favorites cross over?

Unfortunately, never heard of it. Watching the video of it gave me a chuckle though.

Blowing on the cart sometimes worked, if there was errant dust or fluff in the way.

How do you know it was the blowing, and not the act of removing and reseating the cart? That's rather the point of the article.

if there actually is dust and blowing actually takes it out of the cartridge then it works. the article was saying most of the time it wasnt dusty so there was no point to blow on it but we all still do it, hell i've done it on CD's, flash drives, power connections, pretty much everything electronic if a quick unplug replug didnt work i have tried blowing in it and eventually it works though blowing doesnt help it makes me feel like im doing something to help it work.

Blowing may have worked at getting the dust out of the cartridge - assuming you observed it - but that doesn't establish that the dust was the cause of the problem.

When I worked for my uncle's video game business in the mid 1980s I often had to remove the ROMs/EEPROMs from coin-op video games and used an eraser as well to clean the corrosion off the legs.

The PacMan series were the worst and the single data and power connector would always fail, often scorching the PCB causing the traces to lift and come loose. The legs on the EEPROMs on Ms PacMan I worked on fell off I think they were just pressed on, they were a weird gold colour. That was a bad day.

Another interesting fact is that the NES was deliberately designed with the horizontal loading rather than the vertical one (as in the original Famicom) so it looked less like a videogame console, helping to dodge the stigma that consoles had after the Great Crash of 1983.

If this was true, then why could you stick a game genie into your system, not press down, and still get the game to work, even on a broken NES with bent or non-connecting contacts?

The contacts were never the issue. the CIC lockout chip is the culprit everyone's ignoring.

The force was actually borne by the contacts? Man. You'd think they would have put the contacts on something more flexible, and transmit the force with the outer covering.

Yep. I think the idea was to make it behave like the toploading VCRs which were around at the time: insert then press down. Very often customers would refer to the cartridges as "Nintendo tapes".

Sure, the American NES was deliberately designed that way in order to not look so much like a video game device, because everybody was paranoid due to the video game crash having happened recently.

I'm really asking a mechanical question. Basically, if you're going to build an insert-and-press-down device, it would make sense to have a mechanical system to handle all of that separately from the electrical contacts. Basically, you'd have the cartridge slide into some kind of device which captures it and has the springs and latches to make the system work as desired. Within that device, you'd also have the electrical contacts with the cartridge, but set up so that the fragile electrical contacts don't actually transmit the spring's force, which goes through the outer frame instead. You made it sound like the force got transmitted directly through the electrical contacts without any separate spring-loaded device, which seems like a pretty obvious failure point.

Kinda. The point was to push the contacts into position, so some of the force landed there, but I don't think the contacts were actually the fulcrum of the lever. Look at pictures 10 and 11.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/207891/inside_the_nes.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com