So somehow, managed to fuck up one of the pins on the 72PC on my NES and many games won't load(White screen) or have glitched graphics. Older games which don't need the pin load and play fine. I Spent a night trying to figure out what I messed up until I discovered one pin had somehow been bent back into the plastic black part of the 72PC. Making it impossible to fix for me. I disabled the lockout chip while I was at it, but now I need a new 72PC and i've been searching on the web and have read various stories from "Most 3rd party 72p are crap" to "Some have a death grip on the cart and are of poor quality. While ones that don't are good" to "i've gotten one from such and such place X number of years ago and haven't had a problem" On Ebay there is like a million different 72PCs from the Same 2 sellers, and then a bunch of lots of used official ones. So I have no idea what to do. Is it like a lottery and I just gotta get one and hope it's good?
i ordered 2 from ebay as a "just in case" scenario for about $1 a piece. both are garbage. one is really warped and the other is so tight it can play the game without locking the cart down which got me concerned about gouging the traces upon insertion.
Yeah the latter sounds like the death grip horrors i've heard. Honestly I've seen comparisons between 3rd party and official one and all new ones seems to be the same as the one mentioned here http://console5.com/wiki/Improving_NES-001_Reliability
Anyone ever buy one from this seller? http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-NINTEND...129?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item589b958f81
I've yet to find an original 72 pin connector that couldn't be "tweaked" back into working order with a needle and a steady hand. Ive even had to wedge a small piece of plastic under a pin that I screwed up and that did the trick. Dont give up, I bet you could at least work out a temporary fix untill your next connector gets there. If you really have damaged it beyond repair I'd suggest going for a used original. Nothing beats the real thing.
Yeah well the pin that is busted somehow got pushed completely back into the housing of the black shroud. I don't think even a needle could reach it and pull it back. After taking it apart and looking again I don't know how I would get that pin back into place. But it doesn't matter anyways as I noticed this 72PC is not an original Nintendo OEM one. Which explains why carts take such force to insert and remove(I guess this is the death grip). I guess I gotta find a used OEM one on Ebay. Though it seems they only sell in lots as-is from systems that were "Blinking"
I finally managed to find a seller selling a pair that were untested as "OEM" parts. But there weren't any pictures of the bottom of the connectors to see if they were OEM or not. So I asked if he could check and/or add a picture to see whether it had a symbol or number etched on them. Said that they did and that was adding a picture. And they did. So I bought. From the other pictures, nothing looked damaged. So i'll be cleaning them both up and possibly Boiling one of them to clean them. Will make another post when they arrive!
you could always burn/drill holes in the side of the damaged connector and feed a pice of high test fishing line into the underside of the pins pull up so the pins are flush to the middle pins agian tie the fishing line tight and hot glue the fishing line in place and call it good
Yeah well it's an aftermarket connector anyway. So I don't want to waste the effort. If it was a Nintendo OEM connector. I would do everything I possibly can.
So, I Boiled the 72-pin connectors for the NES that I got off ebay.(Nintendo brand ones and not 3rd party) And the first one works like one would back in the day. Sometimes it doesn't entirely make the connection and you have to pull it in or out. Or blow on it. (Haven't tried 2nd one yet) When I cleaned the ZIF connector contacts on the motherboard I noticed some of the contacts were pretty scratched in the shape of the pins from the 72-pin ZIF. I suspect that it may have been from the aftermarket one in there when I got it. But hard to say, I think that may or may not have something to do with why some games work at first or not. Don't get a blinking grey screen anymore though because I disabled the lockout chip. (But Metal Gear for example flashes a grey screen and then boots into the game. Or it will just boot to the grey screen even though i've cleaned the cart) At this point it seems to work fine enough. Though the OEM Official 72-pin Connectors seem to be a tight fit on the motherboard. Much more so than the 3rd party one. Even though the 3rd party one has a death grip on carts O_T I'm going to put the 2nd connector in a plastic bag and store it somewhere for the future.
