@@8bitjoystick I can’t wait! Also I’m curious too about retro brighting. I hear a lot of heresay that the plastics could become brittle after brighting process overtime have you encountered any issues with your own consoles you’ve retro brightened? I have no experience in retro brightening but would be curious to know you or your dads thoughts on that! Thank you again!
I previously used retrobrite on a super famicom console 2 years ago and it looked great and I didn't have any structural problems with it. I think that 35-year-old plastic is going to be slightly brittle regardless if it is chemically treated with bleach or not. And even then you're only interacting with the the superficial molecules of the plastic. Much of structural integrity is from the entire thing. I'd love to see a retro video game person who's a little bit more into doing some physics testing to see if retrobriting does contribute to the brittleness of plastic. My theory is that it's going to be slightly brittle no matter what you do.
Be vary that some multicarts that uses the reset signal from the CIC won't work correctly if you disable it like this. Not a huge problem though, if you ask me.
What's the reasoning behind disabling the lockout chip to you? Lots of people seem to think it magically make the console boot cartridges in a "not-so-pristine" condition. All it does really is that it stops the NES from resetting when there's a bad connection between just 4 out of the 72 cartridge pins. A bad connection on any of the remaining 68 pins will still yield garbled graphics/sound and/or crashes. I don't recommend this mod to people anymore for this reason. It doesn't really help unless the issue happens to be one or more of those 4 out of 72 pins. @@8bitjoystick
Well, I play a lot of famicom and when there is a connection error on the famicom the game will play but occasionally one of the graphics Banks will be a little glitchy and we'll show slightly corrupted data. That doesn't happen on the OG NES because of the lockout chip. So by cutting the number for connector, you reduce the chances of getting connection errors instead of getting the blinking white screen, you get the blinking green screen. I'm just glad that I was able to do it with my Gunpla nippers and didn't have to get out my Dremel.
That is a great question. I actually made a previous video where I talked about the corrosive effect of oxygen and how they will interact with metal to create corrosive ion residue which will increase the resistance of electrical transmission across the pin between the cartridge connector and the cartridge that are laid loosely together. So the the heated water bath can hopefully reduce the chemical bonds of the corrosive ion residue on the metal and in the process of diffusion will wash it away or at least remove it from the surface. The nice thing about water is that it actually goes and covers the entire area. Then when you're done using another cartridge can help scrub or reshape the pins if they are more likely to needed to be bent back into in shape. The over night vinegar soak is a similar process in that the weak acid will break down more chemical bonds of any remaining corrosive ion residue on the pins. My dad is a retired chemistry professor at atomic research scientist and he reviewed the science bits in the script. Check out my video on this subject. ua-cam.com/video/S30-H5izhDE/v-deo.htmlsi=yfdbw7Y6Z1D3gOOk
Right... I'm an electrical engineer who does a lot of vintage equipment repair and mods and I'm intimately familiar with corrosion. I have yet to find a corroded NES connector, though and looking at this video, it looked perfect. Boiling the connector is a myth, it does nothing - never has and never will. It performs a casual clean, like remove dust, but that's about it. Also the pins are nickel plated steel and the temperature, 100 degrees, will do nothing to the pins, they will not _'bend them back'_ as some people think. The vinegar is only useful for neutralising alkaline attacks since its an acid. If it's not corroded by an alkaline, you might as well pour holy water on it - same effect and nickel rarely rust. But if that connector was badly affected by rust and had some alkaline leak onto it, sure. I suppose. It would just be a temporary affair though, as the pins now lack the protective nickel plating and will fail pretty quickly.
@@vresi I hear what you're saying. I actually had a harder time finding a NES that had connector problems because many of the ones in the local game shops in Portland have already been worked on. I boiled the 72 pin connector on another NES system and I thought that it made a difference it actually made a difference. But it could just be the placebo effect because I worked on it. These connector pins actually looked like they weren't bent, but I have heard of people bending pins when they try to manually scrub them.
@@8bitjoystick Not that my 2 Cents is worth more then anything you guys already said, but I really don't think it's placebo. I'd hazard a guess that vresi doesn't either. The issue is more of long term effectiveness. Does the cleaning help? Yes. I don't think there's an argument there. The issue is how long until you need to clean it again / VS how long a new connector will go before needing help. As a broke 16ish year old I'd do these things to my system and it'd help for a little while (few months?), but that's nothing compared to how long before I even thought to take the system apart to deal with these issues (I think the family one was from 88 and I got my personal one in 90 and wasn't desperate enough to fix it until like 97?). Eventually it did get to the point that even the deep clean didn't help, and I'd try to aggressively reshape the pins, which only seemed to help short term, but I'm not sure it that's technique or, as Vresi hints at, the wear of not just the shape of the pins, but the protective nickel layer.... I wonder if I should revisit bending the pins now that I have more patience as an adult.... Then again I have more cash now too so a new connector seems pretty cheap compared to painstakingly bending each pin one by one..... Another thing I kind of want to revisit is ben heck's solution..... Mount the cartridge port to the tray. No more bending pins. There was a similar kick starter for a more product type solution in the same vein (Blinking Light Win). At any rate, ideally, just keep playing with it and keep making videos as to what happens.
I still think I have a good thesis and that the design of the OG NES makes the system particularly susceptible to the buildup of corrosive ion on the residues on the 72-pin connector. And when they get to the point that they contributing to electronic resistance and impeding the flow of electrons that can result in greater chances transmission issues through the relatively loose connection. Like I said my first video, I still think that you can either use a hot water bath, and overnight acid bath, or manually scrubbing it with ultrafine sandpaper. But if it took 30 years to get this way and I'm able to get 20 years of good use out of it before I need to do something about it, I will consider replacing the 72 connector when this particular system is 50 years old. But like I said my other video. If you want to replace the connector go ahead and do it. I initially replaced the connectors in my other video, but I wasn't happy with the results so I boiled the original connector and it actually did make a big difference in reducing connection problems. This video is basically another video showing how to field strip an NES, and to talk about retrobriting and deep cleaning the 72 pins connectors. Now this makes me want to go and find some research papers.
Love the video! Very relaxing to watch.
Thank you! After I finished it, I realized that I should have put some music over the parts where I fast forward.
Great video! Very easy to follow! I enjoyed all the humor added like drinking the vinegar. Thanks for all the tips!
I will have to do another video later on this summer and bleach my super famicom which is pretty yellowed. Glad you enjoyed it!.
@@8bitjoystick I can’t wait! Also I’m curious too about retro brighting. I hear a lot of heresay that the plastics could become brittle after brighting process overtime have you encountered any issues with your own consoles you’ve retro brightened? I have no experience in retro brightening but would be curious to know you or your dads thoughts on that! Thank you again!
I previously used retrobrite on a super famicom console 2 years ago and it looked great and I didn't have any structural problems with it. I think that 35-year-old plastic is going to be slightly brittle regardless if it is chemically treated with bleach or not. And even then you're only interacting with the the superficial molecules of the plastic. Much of structural integrity is from the entire thing. I'd love to see a retro video game person who's a little bit more into doing some physics testing to see if retrobriting does contribute to the brittleness of plastic. My theory is that it's going to be slightly brittle no matter what you do.
Good to know! Thank you for the reply!!!
Be vary that some multicarts that uses the reset signal from the CIC won't work correctly if you disable it like this. Not a huge problem though, if you ask me.
I will have to try my bootleg multi-carts afterwards. I still have a ton of other ways to play them
What's the reasoning behind disabling the lockout chip to you? Lots of people seem to think it magically make the console boot cartridges in a "not-so-pristine" condition.
All it does really is that it stops the NES from resetting when there's a bad connection between just 4 out of the 72 cartridge pins. A bad connection on any of the remaining 68 pins will still yield garbled graphics/sound and/or crashes.
I don't recommend this mod to people anymore for this reason. It doesn't really help unless the issue happens to be one or more of those 4 out of 72 pins. @@8bitjoystick
Well, I play a lot of famicom and when there is a connection error on the famicom the game will play but occasionally one of the graphics Banks will be a little glitchy and we'll show slightly corrupted data. That doesn't happen on the OG NES because of the lockout chip.
So by cutting the number for connector, you reduce the chances of getting connection errors instead of getting the blinking white screen, you get the blinking green screen.
I'm just glad that I was able to do it with my Gunpla nippers and didn't have to get out my Dremel.
"science is fun"
As long as you practice safe science.
This boiling nonsense is just that - nonsense. It does nothing but a casual clean. And the vinegar thing is just, what?!
That is a great question.
I actually made a previous video where I talked about the corrosive effect of oxygen and how they will interact with metal to create corrosive ion residue which will increase the resistance of electrical transmission across the pin between the cartridge connector and the cartridge that are laid loosely together.
So the the heated water bath can hopefully reduce the chemical bonds of the corrosive ion residue on the metal and in the process of diffusion will wash it away or at least remove it from the surface. The nice thing about water is that it actually goes and covers the entire area. Then when you're done using another cartridge can help scrub or reshape the pins if they are more likely to needed to be bent back into in shape.
The over night vinegar soak is a similar process in that the weak acid will break down more chemical bonds of any remaining corrosive ion residue on the pins.
My dad is a retired chemistry professor at atomic research scientist and he reviewed the science bits in the script.
Check out my video on this subject.
ua-cam.com/video/S30-H5izhDE/v-deo.htmlsi=yfdbw7Y6Z1D3gOOk
Right... I'm an electrical engineer who does a lot of vintage equipment repair and mods and I'm intimately familiar with corrosion. I have yet to find a corroded NES connector, though and looking at this video, it looked perfect.
Boiling the connector is a myth, it does nothing - never has and never will. It performs a casual clean, like remove dust, but that's about it. Also the pins are nickel plated steel and the temperature, 100 degrees, will do nothing to the pins, they will not _'bend them back'_ as some people think.
The vinegar is only useful for neutralising alkaline attacks since its an acid. If it's not corroded by an alkaline, you might as well pour holy water on it - same effect and nickel rarely rust.
But if that connector was badly affected by rust and had some alkaline leak onto it, sure. I suppose. It would just be a temporary affair though, as the pins now lack the protective nickel plating and will fail pretty quickly.
@@vresi I hear what you're saying. I actually had a harder time finding a NES that had connector problems because many of the ones in the local game shops in Portland have already been worked on.
I boiled the 72 pin connector on another NES system and I thought that it made a difference it actually made a difference. But it could just be the placebo effect because I worked on it.
These connector pins actually looked like they weren't bent, but I have heard of people bending pins when they try to manually scrub them.
@@8bitjoystick Not that my 2 Cents is worth more then anything you guys already said, but I really don't think it's placebo. I'd hazard a guess that vresi doesn't either. The issue is more of long term effectiveness. Does the cleaning help? Yes. I don't think there's an argument there. The issue is how long until you need to clean it again / VS how long a new connector will go before needing help. As a broke 16ish year old I'd do these things to my system and it'd help for a little while (few months?), but that's nothing compared to how long before I even thought to take the system apart to deal with these issues (I think the family one was from 88 and I got my personal one in 90 and wasn't desperate enough to fix it until like 97?). Eventually it did get to the point that even the deep clean didn't help, and I'd try to aggressively reshape the pins, which only seemed to help short term, but I'm not sure it that's technique or, as Vresi hints at, the wear of not just the shape of the pins, but the protective nickel layer.... I wonder if I should revisit bending the pins now that I have more patience as an adult.... Then again I have more cash now too so a new connector seems pretty cheap compared to painstakingly bending each pin one by one..... Another thing I kind of want to revisit is ben heck's solution..... Mount the cartridge port to the tray. No more bending pins. There was a similar kick starter for a more product type solution in the same vein (Blinking Light Win). At any rate, ideally, just keep playing with it and keep making videos as to what happens.
I still think I have a good thesis and that the design of the OG NES makes the system particularly susceptible to the buildup of corrosive ion on the residues on the 72-pin connector. And when they get to the point that they contributing to electronic resistance and impeding the flow of electrons that can result in greater chances transmission issues through the relatively loose connection.
Like I said my first video, I still think that you can either use a hot water bath, and overnight acid bath, or manually scrubbing it with ultrafine sandpaper.
But if it took 30 years to get this way and I'm able to get 20 years of good use out of it before I need to do something about it, I will consider replacing the 72 connector when this particular system is 50 years old. But like I said my other video. If you want to replace the connector go ahead and do it. I initially replaced the connectors in my other video, but I wasn't happy with the results so I boiled the original connector and it actually did make a big difference in reducing connection problems.
This video is basically another video showing how to field strip an NES, and to talk about retrobriting and deep cleaning the 72 pins connectors.
Now this makes me want to go and find some research papers.