Repairnig, refurbishing and modifying Nintendo Famicom

So I bought a cheap broken Famicom recently. And in this post I’m going to briefly describe how I fixed and modded it.

Here’s how it used to look:

Here’s how it looks now:

 

Once the unit arrived I plugged it in and it didn’t play, which was expected. After some googling I learned that first thing one should check when dealing with a broken Famicom is the voltage regulator.

I dismantled the unit (I don’t post pictures of this process since there’s the detailed article from iFixit) and located the 7805 regulator. When power is on its pin #1 should read 10V, pin #2 – ground and pin #3 – 5V. My multimeter showed 10V on all three.This means that power board could be burned. To fix that we need to replace the regulator, the fuse and one of the capacitors.

Here’s the power regulator:

The white mass is thermal compound.

Here’s the new fuse:

And finally the capacitor:

 

This video explains the fix in more detail.

After that I plugged the guy in again and it worked. Btw to get it to work on American TV you need an OEM NES RF switch otherwise it won’t work. On the console switch to channel 1 and on the telly channel 96.

That’s great and all but I wanted AV output. I found a very nice tutorial how to add RCA video and audio to your Famicom. I quickly tested the thing on the breadboard and then made the final variant on a strip board:

I got a very nice AV signal with jail bars baaaarely noticeable.

Check it out:

 

Ok this part’s done.

As you probably noticed the shell is dirty and yellowed. So I tried the so called “retrobright” approach to whiten it. It’s kinda helped but not too much although I kept it for 2 days on sunlight and during the night under a UV lamp. But still it looks much better now. I reckon that you might need some good concentration of the peroxide and not 3% shit I bought at Safeway.

Here’s where I ended up putting the jacks: