Nepgear NES
A Couple years ago I bought a used Nintendo Entertainment System after the NES portion of my Retron 3 died. I figured having the actual hardware would be more reliable. My false assumption lead me down a path to completely modding the NES hardware. When I got home and tried to play my "brand new" NES all I got was a blue screen and a blinking red light. I looked up the symptoms and found that this meant that the 72 pin connector was basically dead. So I took it back to the store that I bought it, they plugged it in and it worked. So I took it home again only to find that it didn't work. So I just resigned myself to the fact that I had a broken NES. Which wasn't too bad, I've always thought NES repaints where cool and now I could do one with out worrying about breaking anything.
After much consideration I decided to theme my case mod after a character from the Hyperdimension Neptunia Series since all of the major characters represent video game consoles. I went with my favorite character, Nepgear, even though the NES is not the console she represents. One of the reasons I chose Nepgear is due to her simple color palette would allow for a simple clean design on the NES.
As I started to work on painting the NES I also started to look into ways to fix any of its internal problems. In my search I found that someone had recently made a new pin connector for the NES that doesn't do the VCR pushdown action that puts a lot of wear and tear on your games. This sounded perfect a 72 pin connector was exactly what I needed and an improved lifespan of games was a great bonus. The device called "Blinking light win" is made by a company "Arcade works" and I actually found that buying through them was quite a hassle. I ended up "buying the Blinking Light Win" through eBay for $25, which I think was well worth it.
Additionally I bought some purple LEDs so that the LED on my NES would match its cute new color scheme. Learning to remove the old LED and solder in a new one was quite easy, but a little stressful because I've never soldered something before and didn't want to mess anything up.
Finally I assembled my sexy new NES with all its guts and turned it on. Sadly It only mostly worked. The Image itself was quite garbled but it was playing correctly as I could navigate through the first level of a few games I was familiar with. As you can imagine I was quite sad that I put all that time and effort into repairing my NES to only have it still not work. My biggest fear was that its board itself had issues, which would mean I'd have to buy another NES and swap out the boards. Which wasn't too bad of an option, as long as I can play my games, but I didn't really want to resort to that. So I once again disassembled my NES really scrubbed all the pin connectors and then tried playing again but this time with as minimal parts put together as needed. It Worked! Everything was running smoothly. I was ecstatic. So I reassembled everything only to find it was still garbled. What the HECK!? So step by step I removed pieces of the NES to find the failure point. Turns out the RF shield was pressing against the board or pin connector, so I just reassembled the NES without the RF shield and everything is finally working!
I'm Very happy to be playing my NES again. I know its not perfect, but it's mine and i love it. To top it all off I got Nepgear a game that I know she would enjoy, Metalstorm.
