/vr/ - Retro Games

I bought my Famicom off of Yahoo Auctions Japan through a proxy in Japan. Got it home, AV modded it (lifting pin 21 really removes a lot of the jailbars), and am playing on it right now with a 72-to-60 pin converter from eBay.

The asshole charges something exorbitant now (two years ago they were $6 early 2014 they were $12, now they're $16), but I made an offer for $8 and it was accepted:
http://ebay.to/1BnKkHB

To get expansion audio out of it for my flash cartridge, I did this. Neither pins 53 nor 54 are used on the NES, so I didn't bother fixing the bridge, but supposedly pin 54 is what you should connect to. Both resistors are 10 kilo-ohms. The famicom end is on pin 46 on the back of the board.

I bought my Famicom off of Yahoo Auctions Japan through a proxy in Japan. Got it home, AV modded it (lifting pin 21 really removes a lot of the jailbars), and am playing on it right now with a 72-to-60 pin converter from eBay.

The asshole charges something exorbitant now (two years ago they were $6 early 2014 they were $12, now they're $16), but I made an offer for $8 and it was accepted:
http://ebay.to/1BnKkHB

To get expansion audio out of it for my flash cartridge, I did this. Neither pins 53 nor 54 are used on the NES, so I didn't bother fixing the bridge, but supposedly pin 54 is what you should connect to. Both resistors are 10 kilo-ohms. The famicom end is on pin 46 on the back of the board.

>>2154589
Ignore the solder gore. also cut the trace between pins 46 and 47 on the famicom side if you do this.

>>2154580
Holy fuck that apple monitor looks good.

>live in 'straya
>bought AV mod'd Famicom from Japan
>bought Australian Megadrive power supply

I was tempted to get a 72-60 pin converter but the way the dollar is going its out of the question to buy shit from the US at the moment. Which is where I'd have to buy NES games from because they're even more expensive locally.

>>2154580
Online only if you want japanese cosoles or games. I've only seen japanese games very rarely on craigslist/thrift stores. If your city has a japantown they used to sell imports years ago.

>>2154787

How'd you get it from Japan? Fellow Aussie here trying to get into retro collecting and eBay seems painful.

>>2154917
http://www.japangamestock.com/

Is where I bought mine and where I get most of my games from. If you're buying loose games they give you every fourth game free.

People will probably say the price for the AV mod'd famicom is too high but I'm fucking awful at soldering...and also lazy.

>>2154923

Wow, thanks for replying. That's a really cool site.

>>2154787
I'm also an Aussie I'd recommend Japanese Auctionsites such as Yahoo Japan Auctions and there is a physical store called super potato which if you can get an SS to visit would be a good place to start.

So without AV-Mod it's not possible to play a Famicom in the west, especially like Europe(with European TV)?

I'm more interested in western consoles in Japan. You never hear about the Japanese guy with a massive NES collection,

>>2155030
well, there's no real need for it?
there might be a few otaku who do this but it's rare and no real demand since they also have all the consoles and games by source..

still, some retrogame shops also have NES consoles and games, but very very overpriced.

>>2155025
The regular Famicom uses RF output so if your TV can support that then its fine.

>>2155025
Correct you will need either a sharp twin famicom or av famicom (nes 2)

>>2155052
Euro tvs cant output NTSC through the RF socket only AV

>>2155152
>Euro tvs cant output NTSC through the RF socket only AV

Yes they can.

I want that monitor, that looks gorgeous.

>>2155159
No they cant,im talking about CRTs by the way,ive never owned a hdtv so i dont know if they can do it or not.

>>2155187
My small CRT from 1998ish and others from that decade support 60hz over RF. Granted I only tried systems which just couldn't display color on 60hz, but 240p NTSC display is fine over AV, it's 480i NTSC they have a problem with. Unless you got a consumer trinitron or something.

>>2155025
You can play a famicom on american TV's, at least, if you can tune to channel 95.
If you have a european TV, it is possible to get it working without a mod but you'll need to import an american or japanese VCR. If you buy american it must tune to channel 95, and if you buy japanese it WILL work if it has a built in tuner and an AV output.
Best quality comes from a good AV mod though. Do that or get an AV famicom (which is a lot more expensive).

>>2154765
>>2155170
>Glorious monitor
It's an apple //e composite monitor. It was a $5 buy at a local HAMfest two years ago!

judging from those dials it looks like it can display overscan too, and let you adjust the vertical and horizontal hold.

I'm looking for a super famicom or european SNES so I can have a SNES that doesn't look like shit. Anything special to look for?

>>2155541
Did you connect your Famicom via composite is it using a VGA mod to output the screen. I'm pretty curious

>>2155810
the FC is composite modded, and this is a composite apple monitor.
A lot of old home computers in the 80's had special composite monitors, like what was used in broadcasting back in the 70's and 80's. They were extremely high quality displays (for the time), and the monitors for computers were among the first consumer equipment with a composite jack.

>>2155810
>>2156092
I used the schematic attached to make my video amp circuit.
I pulled Q1 (a transistor near the PPU) and FC2 (I think it's a ferrite core) from the board as well, but FC2's location differs by board revision. If you don't have these exact resistor values, string together resistors until they add to these values.
C5 is a 220 microfarad capacitor. You can not string capacitors together to increase their capacitance. Be sure you get polarity right for C5 (it's the only capacitor it matters for).
C6 is a 560pf capacitor; I used a ceramic one.

The best way to remove the jailbars that appear on a famicom is to lift pin 21. this is a HARD thing to do properly and CAN BREAK THE PIN if done wrong.
I used an x-acto knife after making sure the solder was completely gone from underneath and the pin was loose. I rotated the knife so that the pin raised through the hole. I soldered to the pin leaving it suspended above the board.

>>2156137

For audio, I soldered straight to pin 46 of the cartridge connector (where expansion audio comes out of).

Here's the circuit mounted on the board (if i were to do it again I'd mount it on the top half so I could open the famicom more easily).

>>2156154
I connected that to a single mini DIN connector on the side of the console. If I were to do it again, I'd put it on the other side so I didn't have the wires running under the PCB and possibly picking up interference. As it is, I might try to see if I can find a way to shield them better.

The first time I tried to AV mod a famicom, I removed the RF module on the back and used that area for video out, but I ended up wrecking the famicom while trying to power it properly. Don't repeat my mistake. If you want to try it, here's a hint: the entire chassis of the RF module is ground. The console gets ground from the shielding of the RF module.

>>2156157
whoops, here's a pic.

I had already made a 5 pin DIN to RCA adapter (for my commodore VIC-20) and had no spare RCA female jacks, so I made this adapter to adapt the mini 6-pin DIN to 5-pin DIN in a format compatible with the commodore VIC-20 and Commodore 64.

>>2156165
and here's my DIN to RCA adapter.

>>2156170
and my last pic. Not all famicoms have the VCC (positive, 5v) and GND (ground) clearly labeled. On unclear systems, find the pinout of the PPU
( http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/PPU_pin_out_and_signal_description )
and connect to it's VCC and GND.

and that's it. It's fine now :)

>>2156195
>that orange cart
Famicom games are so sexy

>>2156206
I know, right!?

The first thing I thought when I got the famicom in the mail out of the box was "it's so small!"

>>2156195
One day I am going to get a good soldering iron set up. I think some mods are cool like av or rgb mods. The thing I want to do the most is repair my Game Gear and and maybe replace some gameboy save batteries. Good thing most retro consoles play import games pretty easily.

>>2156195
>still having the cover for the expansion port

mad jelly

>>2156353
I bought two famicoms; one was "UNTESTED" and sold my a seller called 'nakamichi' on ebay.
It worked fine (besides a bit of weird interference)... until I ruined it experimenting with alternative ways to power it. But I could see in the ebay photos that it had the cover and it was $20, so I decided, "yeah, whatever. Guess I'm getting two famicoms".

The other was a tested guaranteed working one that was missing the expansion port cover. That's the one that works and was modded successfully.

>>2156393
clarification: I got two famicoms; one had the expansion port cover.

anyone know where to get new faceplates/decals for famicom controllers? One of mine is a bit... worn.

Since the controllers come attached to famicom's, it's expensive to replace them and I'm wondering if anyone makes/sells just the decals, or maybe new controller cases or something.

>>2156434
http://www.tea4two.jp/products/list.php?category_id=35

>>2156443
Cool.
Now what about one that westerners can order stuff from?

>>2156448
Use a proxy. I imagine demand for them in the west is fairly low so outside of eBay (I haven't looked there) thereprobably aren't too many places that sell them. In fact, tea4two might even be the ones making them?

>>2156454
thanks. Might try that when I feel like importing shit again. :)
>>2156353
Looks like it's your lucky day, tea4two also sells expansion port covers! 569 yen = $4.73 (plus $10 shipping I'd imagine :P)

Looking to buy a famicom for the last couple of years, on and off.

I know they were making them until the early 2000s, so I haven't given up hope of finding a newish still-white one.

Sure I could Retrobrite I'm not spelling it with the zero, fuck off but the lack of sunlight here means it didn't do much for my miggy 1200, so I don't expect a famicom would come out any better.

Any troopers been to Japan lately? Are there many new-looking famicoms about?

Wondering if it's worth just holding off until I have time to visit, myself. Could probably get one in the likes of Super Potato, but I'd rather avoid the gaijin tax if I could.

>>2156434

Try looking on auction sites for JUNK FAMICOM. You may get lucky and find a dead, yellow unit with pretty okay controllers.

They tend to take pics from all angles because what people are buying is a paperweight or just for spares at that point.

>>2154591
>Ignore the solder gore.
How can I?
That's disgusting, how the fuck can someone fuck up that bad? I soldered better than that on my first try. I mean did they drag the fucking iron over the contacts or what? They didn't even twist one resistor contact around the other then trim? They didn't arc the one connector so that they could do two separate solder points.
Did they do it with one hand or something? Was it done by a child with muscular dystrophy who couldn't lift the thing? I just don't get how someone can manage to do it in that way.

>>2156704
Not been to japan, ever, but would love to :)
From what I've seen from people living there, there are LOTS in used game stores in varying shapes.
While I personally think the yellowing adds some charm to the famicom, it is possible to get more UV by buying a black light, or some UV LED's.

>>2157083
bawww
I soldered to the wrong pin a few times and to get the solder off enough that it can fit in the cart slot I had to drag the iron down the pins.

The flux has been cleaned off since then.

>>2157304
>to get the solder off, drag it down the pins

>>2157409
>filename
not sure if troll..

>>2157409
Okay, I can see I angered the moth gods.
I will sacrifice my firstborn NES in appeasement.

>>2156704
Super Potato is actually quite okay for Akihabara, some games are even cheaper there than in the other places. What you want to look out for is the somewhat smaller shop on the main street (retro game camp) that sells premodded famicoms. Those premodded ones are way too expensive (even if they are cheaper than getting an AV, but fuck those). Although retro game camp's bargain bins are cheap I'd avoid the rest (mostly).
The thing to do when in Akihabara is really to go to all shops that specialize in retro games and compare prices then get the one you want if it seems reasonable.

Of course you can find even cheaper if you go to the likes of Hard-Off which has a bit of everything (and if you're lucky they might have a junk item lying around that is easily fixable or even working (just untested)), but these sorts of shops don't have nearly the same breadth in games.

Also the Super Potato in Ikebukuro seemed somewhat cheaper than the one in Akihabara last time I was there.
But for a Famicom in confirmed working condition you will probably have to expect to pay around 4000-5000 JPY (or ~9000 JPY if you want a premodded one...) I think they've been getting more expensive recently.
Playstations and SNES:es can be had for almost nothing though.
The prices i've seen for twin famicoms and in particular AV famicoms have all been crazy high though in all shops I've seen them, so avoid avoid avoid avoid. AV modding a famicom is easy as fuck anyway.

>>2156454
>use a proxy
>to ship it outside Japan

What is even the point of blocking foreigners?

>>2159954
To stop people making shitloads of money off them? or something? maybe?

A few years ago I used to make a killing getting figures from Japan and then reselling them to weeaboos for triple the cost.

>>2159954
Because sometimes a small business doesn't want to put in the effort of researching and setting up a whole new set of shipping policies for a handful of people overseas who want a new famicom controller decal.

>>2160034
So if I'm actually interested about paying some considerable money to fetch up a Famicom and some run of the mill games I am not by any means trying their patience? Please grant me some good news.

>>2154580
>>2154917
>>2154997

I got an av top loader famicom off ebay for 120 aus dollars. Currently waiting for my n8 everdrive cartridge to arrive. Gonna use my MD1/SMS adapter to power it. Out of all the ebay auctions I see Japan has the cheapest postage to australia (and maybe UK). I get most Super fam cartridges for 10 bucks or under and I got my Super fam for $30.

>>2159959
Why didn't those weaboos simply import the figures themselves?