So, I got some rubber pads in for my Super Nintendo pads.  Replaced the ones in my best condition pad.  Feels pretty good. The start and select buttons feel shorter than I remember. And the D-pad feels pretty stiff at the moment. But it's been so long I don't remember what they were like when they were new!

Overall it feels pretty damn good.

Got some thoughts about where to go next.  I'm thinking I may need to try region-free and 50/60hz switch before I get too far into trying to restore the shell.

It's been a while, but finally the stars have aligned and my Super Famicom lives again.

One of the weirdest things to deal with about the Super Famicom is how much like the domestic PAL version of the console it looks. Even down to the shape of the games. Always gotta be paying attention to which version of the system I'm using else I accidently put one of my PAL carts in there by accident!

The ZX81

Well, the ZX first.   It's a 1980, issue 1 ZX81.  So it's only about a year younger than I am.  I also think it's the first time I've ever seen one of these machines in the flesh and it's ridiculously tiny.  The Membrane keypad is horrible.  And the resemblance to it's younger brother is more than just skin deep.  It's really obvious that this is the machine that Sinclair designed just before the Spectrum.



Anyway, A visit to Maplin and one overpriced PSU purchase later, and... nothing.

Turns out this is was my fault.  For some reason, Sinclair decided to change the PSU polarity between the ZX81 and the Spectrum, but I didn't realise this until later.  The 7805 Voltage Regulator got pretty hot, but fortunately it wasn't on too long and it doesn't seem to have done any long-term damage.  Not that a 7805 is a difficult component to replace.

So, a 9VDC Power supply was all this old soldier needed, and it's ready to roll.

Every Color of the Rainbow, so long as it's Magenta or Cyan

So, I've branched out a little.  A schoolteacher friend of mine found a couple of classic Sinclair computers buried in the cupboards at his school:  A ZX81, and a 48k ZX Spectrum+.  The ZX81 was missing a power supply, and the Spectrum was missing nothing, but the keyboard wasn't working:  A common complaint in old Speccies.

Here's the thing.  I have a not insubstantial collection of old Speccies in various states of "not working", including a Plus and a Sinclair 128, both of which use the same keyboard, so I figured we'd be able to get both going in maybe an hour or so.

No.  Ha.

Thought I'd blown the fuse on the Super Famicom.

So I bought a multimeter, which took me a while to get around to it.

but, now I'm sure I've blown the fuse.  Plan of attack involves replacing the irritatingly awkward to obtain SOC fuse with a glass fuse holder.

A little Super Famicom topless action for you.

Aside from dust, crud and corrosion on the shielding, it doesn't actually seem in half bad condition, really.  It's currently running - quite happily, it seems, off a 9v Jaguar power supply.

Which surprises me, a lot of the reading I'd done suggested that I'd probably find a system suffering the "Black screen of death" problem, with a faulty PPU-1 or PPU-2.  With so many variants of the basic chips across many board variants, a fault to one of these is effectively fatal.

Of course, Super Castlevania is an early title for the system, and off the top of my head there's a lot of points of failure this success doesn't rule out.  But I honestly didn't expect to get a Super Famicom which is running as well as this one.