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by periphrasis
1995 days ago
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Regular use gradually bent the pins in the NES cartridge slot. Without really good pin contact, the NES10 lockout chip wouldn’t authenticate the cart, and the flashing red light and blanking screen were the indicators for authentication failure. Using a game genie increased the stress on those pins due to its altered insertion angle for the cartridge. So it wasn’t your imagination: game genie really did “break” your NES. As it turns out though, the pin array can be easily removed and serviced (just clean the pins and gently bend them back into shape) with next to zero risk of damaging the NES. Of course, none of us had the web to look any of this up back in the day, and we were left with schoolyard superstitions like blowing on the cartridge. Now though, it’s quite easy to get a “dead” NES working again. Or just get the revised NES model from 1993 that dumped the NES10 lockout chip and the failure prone front loading slot. |
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I got an NES in 1988 when I was 4 or 5 and it died in 1993 and I got the new design for my birthday (a month before I got an SNES for Christmas, so it didn’t get a ton of use). I stupidly sold it at a garage sale for $20 in 1995, not realizing it would be worth a ton later on. But in 2001 or 2002, I actually took that original NES to an authorized repair center, they shipped it off and it returned, essentially brand new. It still works today. As I recall, I paid less than $50 for the repair, which was less than a front-loading NES was going for at the time on eBay. The fact that Nintendo would service a system that was 16 or 17 years old always stuck with me, especially since Sony disavowed working on a 1996 or 1997-era PSX at that same time (I managed to fix it myself, but Sony was utterly disinterested in even allowing me to pay to repair a misaligned laser and just wanted me to buy the redesigned PS One). It’s part of why I’ve continued to be a loyal Nintendo customer for more than 30 years.