Hi all, I've just finished trying to restore a nes I acquired recently from a friend, the unit didnt work which turned out to be the 72 pin connector which I have resolved and thats all said and done. While I was at it I also replaced the a/v and rf connectors on the unit, gave it a thorough clean and then re-assembled. I purchased a copy of super mario bros for testing, thinking I was getting it from a local supplier (I live in Australia btw, Pal region). However from what I've been reading on the internet it looks like my copy is still a Pal version but possibly an Italian version (I'll add a pic below of the label), something tells me this shouldnt be a problem anyways, I have also removed the lockout pin, while I had the unit open. Since first booting the console the game runs very slow, Ill add a video of the performance of the unit to demonstrate, while the video might have been captured at 30fps via my tuner card, you can tell that any lag committed by my tuner card or by the recording of the video is far too slow to indicate those issues being a problem here. Both the gameplay and audio are excessively slow and pretty much unplayable. One thing I have tried to resolve is mabey it being an overheating issue but the only component i can see that gets pretty hot is a mosphet that is mounted on the outside of the rf unit, which I have re-applied thermal paste (artic silver) but that does not seem to have made any difference. My thoughts are now moving towards could it be a cpu / memory issue? how can I tell if it is? or hopefully the video is enough for someone to be able to diagnose the fault, see what happens! Thanks in advance for any help ladies and gents i appreciate it . Video of performance.. Images are of the label with the game I am testing, I don't currently own any other games at the moment, the other picture is a snap of the label from the console, just incase this is a region issue.
Test with another game, but not a European Mattel one. Those were slower. It's the game, not the console.
Hi Braintrash, thanks for your reply! do you know is there anywhere I can read further on this issue? I would just like to educate myself on the reasons, I'll go pick up another game thats local to my area tomorrow. Is the speed you see in the video normal for the amount of slow down for the european mattel version? Its ok Braintash I just looked up mattell vs nes version on youtube.. the sound coming from the mattell version in that video is about the speed problems im having on my version, I'll get a game tomorrow to confirm that its working and post here, but Thanks very much for clearing that up for me, what a relief!! Cheers mate!
Glad you are relieved. I haven't official reason, but my educated guess from having lived in that era is that when they first imported NES in Europa, it was very poorly did, ie. they didn't took into matter the fact that Europa runs 50Hz rather then 60Hz and as such they didn't adapt the games properly to compensate for that.
The Mattel version isn't actually slow. They made two versions, one for Europe and one for AU. Europe was PAL-A And Australia was PAL-B. The AU one was just as fast as the NTSC version except the music was sped up. As for the European one it was just 10% slower and I am almost certain it was not as slow as that video you had there. It's probably the game, I would suggest trying a different game or buying another copy of Super Mario Bros.
It's definitely the game. I remember a while back I was restoring some NES consoles and one of them was an Asian PAL. When I inserted an NTSC Super Mario Bros the game play was about 15% to 20% faster. It was very noticeable in the music. As mentioned above, consoles from different regions run at different speeds. This is most likely your problem.
