Nes not playing games with player 2 chip in

Discuss hardware-related topics, such as development cartridges, CopyNES, PowerPak, EPROMs, or whatever.

Moderator: Moderators

Post Reply
Wyatt150
Posts: 7
Joined: Fri Aug 26, 2022 2:27 pm

Nes not playing games with player 2 chip in

Post by Wyatt150 »

To make a long story short I had an nes board that would play games very intermittently and when it would it would crash after some time, now I can't stress this enough, the 72 pin cartridge connector is not and was not the issue. After struggling with this and yes, trying multiple 72 pins and cleaning them and replacing ram chips, the issue persisted.
I ended up buying an opentendo board because I happened to have two other dead boards as well. After assembling it and fighting with some other issues it worked great, until I went to assemble it into a case, when I did this I kid you not the exact problem came up at the exact part of assembly I was at when installing the last board with this issue, except this time I have all the ic's socketed so I replaced every one that I had spares for (everything but the ppu), nothing changed about the behavior.
Eventually I found that it will boot up perfectly with any cart I try without the gamepad controller chip for player 2 installed. Now these chips are chips I have 6 copies of and none work, and the only parts that are consistent between the two boards are the ppu and the acrylic caps that happen to go to that controller port.
I guess at this point my option is to replace those caps but in the mean time I would greatly appreciate any new idea's as to why this is happening besides a bad 72 pin connector, like I said I tried that many times so please don't recommend that with good reason. The weirdest thing is with that ic installed it sometimes just has a blue screen but sometimes the screen just kinda goes crazy with changing color every couple seconds and just random interference.
Last edited by Wyatt150 on Sat Aug 27, 2022 1:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
lidnariq
Posts: 11432
Joined: Sun Apr 13, 2008 11:12 am

Re: Nes not playing games with player 2 chip in

Post by lidnariq »

Could you edit your post to have a few more line breaks? It's such a wall of text I have trouble following
lidnariq
Posts: 11432
Joined: Sun Apr 13, 2008 11:12 am

Re: Nes not playing games with player 2 chip in

Post by lidnariq »

Is there any chance that there's a bare piece of wire or a odd solder joint somewhere near the player 2 socket? My WAG is that when you install the RF shield it's shorting something out
Wyatt150
Posts: 7
Joined: Fri Aug 26, 2022 2:27 pm

Re: Nes not playing games with player 2 chip in

Post by Wyatt150 »

lidnariq wrote: Sat Aug 27, 2022 6:45 pm Is there any chance that there's a bare piece of wire or a odd solder joint somewhere near the player 2 socket? My WAG is that when you install the RF shield it's shorting something out
It seems something like that was issue, I resocketed the chip and I guess happened to chose the one that worked the best because now it works, with this particular nes I'm probably going to forgo the rf shields because of my pin connector set up and the bottom one was shorting out something unrelated as it was so that one wasn't present in the first place.
User avatar
Ben Boldt
Posts: 1149
Joined: Tue Mar 22, 2016 8:27 pm
Location: Minnesota, USA

Re: Nes not playing games with player 2 chip in

Post by Ben Boldt »

You can always put a piece of tape on the shield any areas that you think might cause a short. If there is something sharp that might poke through tape, you can cut a piece of plastic from the garbage (milk jug, ice cream bucket, butter tub, etc) and tape that on there as well.
Wyatt150
Posts: 7
Joined: Fri Aug 26, 2022 2:27 pm

Re: Nes not playing games with player 2 chip in

Post by Wyatt150 »

Ben Boldt wrote: Sun Aug 28, 2022 1:28 pm You can always put a piece of tape on the shield any areas that you think might cause a short. If there is something sharp that might poke through tape, you can cut a piece of plastic from the garbage (milk jug, ice cream bucket, butter tub, etc) and tape that on there as well.
This particular nes is a combination of all my worst conditioned parts so the case pieces are beat up and the mounting pegs in particular are a pain in the but in this case because most are either cracked or the threads have been cut to a bigger size because I didn't have the original screws so it's just not worth it to put in the rf shields especially because my only method of desoldering stuff is hot air and that works good but melts normal plastic so I don't have the controller port connectors soldered on the motherboard, rather I have the wires soldered directly to it so I would have to cut the rf shields in order to make them fit onto the mobo.
On top of that there's just a bunch of extra crap wires and stuff because of a stereo mod and the fact the power board wires and controller port wires have all been cut and extended and shortened back up and re-extended so it's too much work to get the already bent up shields to fit when I could just ignore the interference when using rf.
Post Reply