Technical and Repair Assistance

[Lovlss]

Found my brothers digi camera here we go.



Hehe I guess the wink meant at first you might not notice but the letters to what each wire is is printed on the board. Compared to yours one of the extra pins is for the power switch and the other is soldered together(VCC).



This is the NES RF/AV/Power board. From a link on benheck's forums I think those are the A V pins. Not totally sure of course. So essential what you meant before was it is possible to remove the original famicom board and transplant an NES one, by knowing which pin goes where.

Has anyone ever done this transplant/mod?



Not that this one matters anymore but that is how the A/V cables that looked dark but sounded fine were connected.

[133MHz]

I'll now check the NES RF box for you, I'll be back with the answer in a couple of minutes.

[133MHz]

Here you go:


The two leftmost contacts marked with a are the power switch contacts. Short these together to turn on the RF box. The third one is 5V, and the others are Audio & Video respectively. Ground is the metal shield, or the middle pin on the 7805 voltage regulator. And yeah, by knowing which pin does what you can replace the Famicom RF board for the NES one and it'll work perfectly, with fully functioning RF & AV outputs!

[Lovlss]

Thanks. The shorting of those switch contacts is the only thing I sort of need clarification on. So that corresponds to the VCC on the famicom that is soldered together? Hooking up the famicom power switch to that is the only thing I am I think you mean solder them together and solder the white end of the switch to that and solder the white/red end to ground. Is that right?

thanks. I am going to the store and when I come back I will give it a go.

[MattyD]

I might give that a go as well as I have an old Famicom with that same board, which I tried unsuccessfully to mod according to one of the Japanese pages. It's just been sitting upside down with case off for months now. I can't even tell if it works or not as none of my TV sets has the right channel in its RF range.

[ericj]

I could never get my famicom to work either. Since I have a twin fami and a few famiclones, I really don't care. Someday I'll get that bastard to work 

[nurd]

Every time you mod a famicom, all the other Famicoms will be worth a little more.

[MattyD]

I could never get my famicom to work either. Since I have a twin fami and a few famiclones, I really don't care. Someday I'll get that bastard to work 

Yeah I ended up getting a Famicom AV in the end but I'm glad I did as it's a lovely machine. I'm just sore about the amount of time and money I spent finding the original Famicom (not an easy thing to come by in the UK) and then racing around, buying parts and looking for info online. You live and learn I guess 

[chiruno]

Hi, I have only recently ordered an original famicom, and it arrived a few days ago.
So today I decided to set it up. I managed to connect it to my TV and get an appropriate converter, and didn't really have much trouble apart from a single thing: the sound doesn't seem to work correctly.
So after trying out all channels on my TV (on both CH1 and CH2) I failed to find one that fits, so I went looking for frequencies. I ended up finding a few good frequencies that displayed fine (one on CH1 that worked fine, and one on CH2 that worked fine), however sound-wise there is either nothing, or really really bad quality sound, unbearably loud TV buzzing and having the actual sound somewhere mixed in quietly.

Does anybody have a clue on what might be wrong?

It's not really an urgent help request, but playing without sound is rather irritiating on the long run, and I would certainly prefer having it. Thanks in advance!

[UglyJoe]

My second-player controller seems to cause a loud buzzing.  Try adjusting the volume slider on the controller and see if the buzzing gets quieter/louder as you move it.  If so, try moving the second-player controller around and see if it helps (works for me, just have to orient it the right way and the buzzing stops).

[chiruno]

After testing, the microphone did not make a difference relating to the loud buzzing noise, so that's sadly not the solution.
Thanks, though!

[133MHz]

What channel are you using for your Famicom? Remember that even if Japan and the US are NTSC, they're slightly different in the channel frequency table, so you may get decent video but the audio tuning is slightly off and your TV can't compensate. You'll have to look for an Automatic Fine Control or similar and disable it, and fiddle with the fine tuning (if you can find such a setting, it mostly disappeared from modern TVs) until you get clear sound.

As a theoretical experiment you could fiddle with the coils inside the Famicom RF board, but I wouldn't do that since you'd probably do more harm than good.

[chiruno]

Thank you, I'll go have a look if there's some sort of Automatic Fine Control that I can disable, though I'm not quite sure what you mean. Are you referring to the frequency search?

I don't use a particular default channel that's on my TV (I've raided all of them and didn't find any that seemed to output much apart from snowstorms), but one I set to the frequency 096.50 (with the famicom on CH1). This one gives me decent video output but lacking in sound completely. I've messed around and searched through all the available frequencies, however all frequencies involving sound contain the problematic buzzing noises. I've tried both CH1 and CH2, though I'm not sure what the difference between those is, apart from the fact that they use different frequencies.

Remember that even if Japan and the US are NTSC

On another note, maybe I should have stated this earlier but I live in europe (though my TV is capable of working with NTSC).
I wonder if this might be part of the problem, or the problem itself. <<;

[133MHz]

That may be it. Most European TVs which are capable of displaying NTSC video usually only allow it through their AV inputs (RCA or S-Video), they cannot tune into NTSC broadcasts. Maybe your TV is trying to demodulate the audio from the signal in some European standard (B/G/K/N) instead of the American/Japanese one (M/J).

It seems you'll have to AV mod your console.

[chiruno]

The TV I own is a Daewoo 20C4NT made in europe, so that definitely sounds like a possibility.

However, I'm rather nervous about opening up my fami so I'm not sure if I really want to AV mod it. From what I understand it's simply skipping the high frequency stuff and making it directly go to the TV per AV, right? I can picture it, however I'd need a lot of stuff to go do such a mod as well.

Are there any easier/less risky alternatives? I recall something about VCRs, but I'm really not sure.