Nintendo Super System (and SNES/SFC) repair/diagnosis logs

Hey,

Over the last few months I repaired a bunch of Nintendo Super System (arcade, similar to Playchoice 10, but SNES based) motherboards... I finally had some time this weekend to go through my notes and make a page with my repair logs, as well as a bunch of pictures of what various failures looked like. Hopefully this will help others in the future to diagnose and repair their Super System and SNES/SFC motherboards.

Some interesting statistics... the CPU was by far the most common failure. I came across 24 bad CPUs, 4 bad PPU1s, 4 bad PPU2s, 1 bad APU, and no bad WRAMs or VRAMs. Every failure was in the SNES circuitry, with the exception of the audio/video output (burnt resistors, etc). There were no failures in the Z80 menu/timer circuitry.

Anyway, I posted it here: http://projectvb.com/nss/logs.htm

DogP

This is really interesting/impressive/cool. Thanks for sharing.

I would love to build out an NSS rig, but the real problem are the games. It's only possible to find the three stock titles in any kind of frequency. The other 10 show up maybe one time every two years each on eBay, usually in untested condition, and for $200+ a piece. I've never once seen the rarest ~5 or so games for sale (Contra especially.)

Right now, there's exactly one seller, and aside from the usual three, he has Irem Skins game and NCAA Basketball.

I've completed entire US and JP boxed SNES game sets (2100+ titles), but gave up completely on the NSS.

Yep... I agree that the number of games (and their limited availability) is a huge problem with the Super System. I built an adapter to play SNES cartridges on the Super System so I could run a flash cart, Super Mario Kart, Star Fox, Super Game Boy, etc. Being able to play the entire SNES library revived my interest in the system.

Obviously, I could just play the games on the SNES, but I've got over 40 arcade games, so having the arcade version of one of my favorite systems in my lineup is pretty cool (and comments from people on the obnoxious controllers are always funny ). I'm more of a gamer than a collector, so having the original Super System cartridges/mini-marquees isn't that important to me. Some NSS versions of games have slight differences from the SNES versions (level select, difficulty, # of lives, continues, etc), which makes them a little bit interesting... but they can be run from a flash cart as well.

DogP

Great information!

It will be of great help with a batch of broken SNES motherboards that I recently picked up.

Thank you for sharing your repair logs!

Thanks for posting! Really good details.

No prob... I hope this helps, and if not, I'm glad you guys at least find it interesting.

DogP