Decades later, I still have my NES. Over the years I have owned Super Nintendo, Genesis, Sony Playstation, N64, and GameCube. Being 26, I have lost interest in the new generation of video game systems (although my brother has Wii, and I admit it is cool as hell). Fact is, I really don't give a damn about new video games, and have much better things to do than waste hours of my life playing World of Warcraft or Everquest (such as post in PelicanOT!)
The exception seems to be the original NES. Maybe it's because my generation grew up on Nintendo, maybe it's because the (good) games rely on playability instead of graphics, maybe it's because the games are quick and easy to pop in and play a quickie (I am contrasting Tetris/Dr. Mario to, say, Resident Evil or any of the huge RPGs that are popular now).
NES is a popular conversation piece among my generation; before we go out to a bar ("pregaming") on Fri/Sat, we will have a couple beers and play Super Mario Bros.; at the end of a night, as the party is winding down, the stragglers will pop in Dr. Mario or Tetris for some healthy, half-drunken competition. It's that kind of thing.
Well, like any NES, my Nintendo was starting to show its age. Anyone that has had NES will know what I am talking about
: sometimes, when trying to turn the system on (and sometimes in the middle of a game!), the power light and the TV screen will blink on and off. The common wisdom is to take the game cartridge out of the system, blow in it, blow in the system itself, and try again.
The sad truth about blowing in the NES game is that it doesn't work. Dust/dirt have nothing to do with why NES games don't work sometimes. It all comes down to electrical connections: inside the NES is a motherboard with 72 electrical connectors. These connectors attach to the plastic locking mechanism that lowers the game down and into place. This mechanism has 72 pins that connect to the motherboard, and 72 pins that connect to the game cartridge. Over time these pins get corroded, and need to be cleaned. Also, the pins that connect to the game get pushed back from repeated game insertion (insert sexual joke here). These two factors lead to an inconsistent electrical connection between game and cartridge, leading to the blinking light/screen.
Finally, this week, after multiple tries to play Dr. Mario with my girlfriend on a rainy afternoon, I'd had enough. I had to fix my Nintendo.
Here's a fun fact: every screwdriver I own (mostly multi-heads with adapters) were too wide to fit in the space required... except the dual screwdriver that came in the Porsche tool kit included with all of our cars! That's it in the next pic:
If they wanted to, the NES's engineers could have made the unit MUCH smaller that it was. Oh well, I guess they wanted the thing to look big and sturdy, like a VCR or something...
This is the plastic piece with the pins that must be bent back into position. I used a glasses repair kit screwdriver. Worked like a charm.
Once I got all the connections clean and bent the pins back into place, the Nintendo worked as good as new. Hasn't given me any trouble since! It's kind of funny that this was top of the line technology back in the mid 1980s, but nowadays it seems almost quaint.
