Is the SNES a realible console? So worried about reliability

Lately, I've been looking up SNES videos on YouTube and i seen many broken SNES videos such as them glitching, freezing or crashing. What could cause CPU or PPU failure? I have two SHVC-CPU-01 consoles working. One is a 1/1/1 model and the other is a 2/1/3 model. All work great but i'm worried about the chips failing in them. Is the SHVC-CPU-01 model a bad version to have. Even though the ver. 1 cpu is known for a DMA bug that causes the SNES to crash, It never crashed on me. Please let me know. And yes i'm using the correct power supply which i'm using the SNS-002 Power adpater. Is there a way to prolong the life of my SNES consoles?

 

I haven't heard of SNES consoles being unreliable. I've never had a problem with any SNES ever since 1992. Beyond bad storage conditions and a tiny percentage of not so good chips I can't see a mass failure of SNES consoles in the near future. Just take care of it, you should be good.

 

At worst you may have to replace a cap. The power supply port sometimes breaks too.

 

The mass failures are already happening, I sometimes see 2-3 in a week at my repair shop, most of my console sales are to people who have dead units. Any console I see serial number un24 or lower or Un8 are considered suspect due to cpu problems. Problems ranging from black screens, graphics glitches, game crashes etc. My experience is that it is mostly random, I had one new in box that was dead but many roach infested units that work. It seems to come down to luck most failures seem to have the it worked 10 years ago type issue, I haven’t been able to verify a single failure on an actively used unit or a B revision or 1chip. 1chips have a similar issue with the S Apu chip but isn’t nearly as common. Failures of B revision units are fairly rare in general, mostly due to abuse or capacitor issues, I usually don’t bother repairing those because they usually have a good cpu donor. If possible test a system with Final Fantasy III before buying. If the entire opening plays without any problems the system should be fine, that has so far missed only 1 failure. If you don’t have that, many games that are mode 7 heavy or have expansion chips are good too. Seems to be the least reliable of the common cartridge systems save for the game gear, Still far more reliable than most disc consoles aside from later playstations. To summarize if it works don’t worry about it, if buying one test it fully or get a good return policy, if flipping for profit you’ll get burned fairly often if you aren’t careful. And for the love of god don’t test with street fighter...

 

Why not?

 

Because that will often run perfectly fine on faulty systems. I have had far too many people try to return “defective” games that have worked just fine because their console “worked with street fighter” I could say Pocky & Rocky, but most people don’t have that nor would it be the go to game to test a system with.
Edit: Mario Kart, Mario World and F Zero are good for testing if used together.

 

Same experience here, for the most part. But I did once have a working SHVC console with a good CPU that I stored for a month or so. Before storing it I had tested it fully with over a dozen games, ran the Burn-in test, tested mode 7, etc... It was totally fine. But when I took it back out the CPU had failed. Games ran more or less fine but there were some graphical glitches in one of my test games and the Burn-in test said DMA FAIL. It wasn't a cart slot issue either, since I tried some known good cartridge slots with the same result. I didn't have a donor CPU at the time so I just put it aside for a while. Once I finally had a donor CPU I tested it again just for the heck of it and it had actually gotten worse. Some games would just give a black screen, while others were very glitchy and would crash before long. Of course, it was fine after replacing the CPU, but it's a particularly memorable repair to me because it's the only time I ever actually witnessed the CPU fail on a console while it was in my possession.

 

Wow, We are seeing a bunch of failed SHVC-CPU-01 units lately. I had that model growing up and it was my first ever SNES i had and never failed me ever. Is there a way to prolong the life? I have two working SHVC-CPU-01 units and i want to prevent the CPU from failing like smilecirtus's SHVC CPU 01 did. Will taking care of it, keeping it clean and using the correct Power supply with it last me a very long time?

 

Like people were saying above, it's the actual custom CPU/PPU chips that are randomly failing. The only "repair" happening in these situations is cannibalizing other consoles for custom no longer made parts. Of course, you want to make sure the voltages being served to the chips are correct -- but even then, I assume the same random chip failures will continue to occurs.

No packaged IC will last forever. We can only speculate how prevalent the random failures will be at intervals of the future.

My experience has been that most SNESs still work as is. If you read nothing but the 'repair' forums, you will undoubtedly come across the examples where things fail. However, given the ~50 million units sold, I don't think a few forum posts are enough to declare it generally unreliable. I'm only speculating, but I believe the failure rate for CPU/PPU to still be pretty small.

Compare this situation to the Atari 5200 controller...where it's more common to see a dead controller than a working one. That's something worthy of an "unreliable" designation.

 

The only problem with that is that each one fails with different effects, I had one fail with incorrect text colors in chrono trigger, back when I was using that to test. My guess is what’s failing is the internal attachment of the pins to the die of the chip. That’s why these failures seem to resemble other types of failures. The failing chips that still boot also tend to black screen upon transplant into another board, that only happened to 2 working B revision chips, mostly because I screwed up the transplant.

 

In the events game and in the selling business I have only really come across 2 broken SNES machines
One was a graphics issue the other was black screen

Normal use they will work

 

My SNES which I bought new suffered a failure in one of the two PPU chips which causes vertical lines in sprite cells. So "normal use" doesn't magically protect it. The SNES is known to have custom IC failures. I only found out about it after I started looking into what was wrong with my console. My guess is they had some manufacturing issues with some of these batches of chips. And maybe over time/heat cycles the imperfection results in failure. How wipe spread chip failures are is anyone's guess. You might never run into a console with one. Or you might have bad luck and come across many. For myself I just bought a working unit in a less than great case and swapped the PCBs. Swapping the actual ICs requires more than basic soldering and you risk damaging your donor part. Plus why take apart a working board to fix a broken one.

 

Is that a US one?

As I said out of all the ones I have ever used only two where broken

Some people go on about motherboard revisions and one is better than the other, but that is usually the MegaDrive

 

I've got like 5 dead ones and I'm in the UK.

 

If you want the short answer, I think that even considering their age, they are pretty solid consoles. Of course some are going to be faulty.

 

Shorter answer - stop worrying about everything (see all the playstation threads) and just play them.

 

Exactly worrying about it isn’t going to do any good, play it while it works

 

They're very reliable consoles but parts do and will eventually go bad. With the recent trend of people who shouldn't be opening consoles to "clean" or mod them I'm not at all surprised that failures have spiked.

 

This is not about people tampering with consoles and breaking them, it is about component failure over time or manufacturing faults.

 

There are ten NTSC SNES/SFC motherboard revisions and four PAL SNES revisions. Some are better than others.