I opened a Famicom I recently received in the mail. The first thing I noticed was the lack of switches on the reverse side of the unit. I opened the unit and the power board appears to be different from what I have usually seen, no RF shielding either. Says "SANKO DENSHI" on the bottom side of the PCB. Has anyone seen a board like this?
if your FC has square buttons and a smooth base, then its an original release famicom, it may have different internals to the rerelease, or yours may be a latr board revision
Not a square button Famicom. The main reasons I am concluding aftermarket: Lack of RF shielding around majority of the circuit. Lack of TV/Game and channel select switch. Also to note, the RF output connection is loose due to cold soldering connections. This could have been pulled from a Famiclone to fix this unit. I can go on-and-on with the speculations. Just curious if anyone had seen this particular board before.
Yeah, looks aftermarket to me - probably a conversion to work with TVs that only had UHF tuners. At the least, I'm pretty certain it's not designed to work on the same ~100MHz the original Famicom RF board was - more like 500-600MHz based on the number of turns in the coils in the output stage. Also, the transistors being used are 2SC3358s, which have a 7GHz transition frequency and would be complete overkill for a VHF modulator.