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So I was playing Kid Icarus on my PowerPAK tonight doing my best to play through it complete for the first time. I'd been playing for a couple hours I suppose and reached level 3-4. Playing the dungeon randomly the game resets. Then again, and again, and I look and see the power light blinking. The CIC in the console I guess decided it didn't like the ciclone anymore? I powered the system off and back on without moving anything and it was a happy camper again. Has anyone else experienced this? Strange that after so long it would suddenly glitch on me. It made me very unhappy as I was near the end of the game. Makes me want to look into removing the CIC in the console.

Can you just desolder the CIC from the console rather than clipping a pin? Or would that not work for some reason?

I'm not sure if it's safe to remove entirely, but you can desolder it, bend the pin outwards, then solder it back in with the pin left sticking out.

The reset signal is routed through the CIC from what I understand. My guess is you could get around that by jumpering in the CIC's place, not sure what pins though.

But has anyone else had this happen to them while playing? This was probably one of my longer play sessions. It's the only time I've ever had the lockout chip randomly reset the game. The system wasn't touched at all, it was just random.

And can anyone say definitively that you cannot just desolder the lockout chip or if you do need to bridge something?

MottZilla wrote:Can you just desolder the CIC from the console rather than clipping a pin? Or would that not work for some reason?

I've done so. It works great. You'll want a little patch afterwards, though, because the CIC was responsible for keeping the 2A03 in reset during initial power-up.

The patch: The red capacitor is 0.1uF, the vertical resistor is 100k. I just tried things until it consistently worked and wasn't too long. This should be safe against CIC stun circuits—all 3 pins that originally connected to the CIC now float. The last (used to be CIC CLK) still comes from the 74HCU04. This is a picture of what I said four years ago.

edit: used a continuity meter to make sure CIC stuns wouldn't harm anything
edit 2: removed untruths; you need to connect something to what was pin 9 of the CIC.

Out of curiosity, anyone know how the top loader and famicom handle the reset at power up?

infiniteneslives wrote:Out of curiosity, anyone know how the top loader and famicom handle the reset at power up?

Per the schematic at the main page, the famicom just connects the reset switch and a 0.47µF capacitor to the 2A03's /RST input.

Not certain about the NES-101; there isn't a RE'd schematic of it floating around the internet and pictures of it don't show the traces going to the CIC pins or from the reset button.

infiniteneslives wrote:Out of curiosity, anyone know how the top loader and famicom handle the reset at power up?

Since the PPU RESET pin is tied straight to +5v, when you push reset, it's not reset so you only need that code which loops through reading it's status flag on the first power up. On a toaster NES, they have the screen blink when it RESET (PPU is reset with the CPU) to give a psychological effect (also the same reason they make the power LED blink when the system is reset) then every time it's reset counts on as a power up reset for the PPU.

I don't know if the top loader NES have the PPU setup like a Famicom, though.