Just got finished with a case swap for my Super Famicom!
About 6 months ago I picked up a super battered old SFC from a shop here in Taiwan. The seller told me it was broken, but for a few dollars I was willing to take the risk. Sure enough it was broken, it think a faulty ppu or one of the RAM chips or something.
Anyway, flash forward to yesterday and I finally got to meet up with Dave from NA, who some may know here as fcgamer! He was generous enough to gift me, among a few other things, another SFC! What a great bloody guy!
Now, as you will see in the pictures below, it was just as filthy as my one, but the case is about as yellow as they come... Looks like it has been sitting in dirty bong water for 20 years! However, this one actually works, so I decided to clean the case of my old one and just swap the innards.
Overall, a pretty smooth process, I love the way companies used to design electronics so you can easily disassemble and reassemble them, great attention to detail! Only hurdle was that I was swapping a 2nd revision board into a 1st revision case, which meant I had to trim down one of the molded screw fixtures for it to fit. Lucky for me I was doing it that way round, as fitting a 1st revision board into a 2nd revision case would take WAY more modification.
Anyway, check out the pics below! It's still not exactly mint, but it looks soooooo much better! And thanks again to Dave, you sir are awesome!
Anyway, flash forward to yesterday and I finally got to meet up with Dave from NA, who some may know here as fcgamer! He was generous enough to gift me, among a few other things, another SFC! What a great bloody guy!
Now, as you will see in the pictures below, it was just as filthy as my one, but the case is about as yellow as they come... Looks like it has been sitting in dirty bong water for 20 years! However, this one actually works, so I decided to clean the case of my old one and just swap the innards.
Overall, a pretty smooth process, I love the way companies used to design electronics so you can easily disassemble and reassemble them, great attention to detail! Only hurdle was that I was swapping a 2nd revision board into a 1st revision case, which meant I had to trim down one of the molded screw fixtures for it to fit. Lucky for me I was doing it that way round, as fitting a 1st revision board into a 2nd revision case would take WAY more modification.
Anyway, check out the pics below! It's still not exactly mint, but it looks soooooo much better! And thanks again to Dave, you sir are awesome!
Comments
For the journey, I decided to bring a few goodies along for him. We had discussed a few of the things prior, while chatting, but the Super Famicom was a random thing I did. I saw it sitting in the extra room, remembered it was working, and knew that Andrew was a gamer, feeling he and his kids would appreciate this a lot more than I would the few dollars I'd get from selling it, or worse yet, the garbage man should I switch apartments again. As we were riding around, OptOut had told me that his SFC was broken, and only later in the evening did he realize that I had brought over a spare for him, haha, it was totally unplanned but a great coincidence!
I am so happy to see about this case swap, glad to see that the machine was working as I had remembered, and hope you enjoy it mate! I'm just at 7-11 now, waiting until 20:00 to do a class at my evening job, but I'll shoot you a message when I get home. Hope we definitely can hang out again sometime, I know some places I want to show you to as well, in my area.
Anyway, I finally have a reason to start expanding a little into Super Famicom collecting, and that IS exciting! Combine this with the release of the SNES mini, and I think this is gonna turn into a bit of a Super Nintendo year for me!
What symptoms did the old original version board have? RF only? Scrambled picture?
It was very bad. Basically, just a blank red screen, or a blank black screen, or sometimes like a grey screen. Sometimes it looked like there were random squares of red on an otherwise black screen... Absolutely nothing resembling actual graphics, zero sound. This was all on AV, I never tested the RF.
Also, one of the pins in the pin connector was broken, so that probably didn't help. When I first got the system I assumed THAT was the problem, so I swapped it with a good one, but then I realised the problem was far worse!
Don't worry though, I will still be keeping the broken board and gross shell! I doubt I will ever find a use for it, but you never know!
Have fun getting Thracia 776; I lucked out and got a complete copy of the rarer variant for $90 at a store in Japan. Heck, have fun getting ANY of the Nintendo Power exclusive carts.
Ha ha ha, you are surely joking right? No way I'm gonna be finding anything like that, in fact I hadn't even heard of those games till now, lol!
Probably just play my Batman Returns for now, it's currently the only SFC game I got!
Did you guys hit up any of that old booze?
We didn't actually! I'm not too keen on brandy or whiskey at the best of times, and when it's been sitting around for god knows how many decades I'm even less adventurous, lol!
I WILL be passing that stuff on at some stage to someone who can appreciate it more though don't you worry about that!