Monthly Archives: November 2016

NES Toploader AV Mod – Preparation

To jump between posts in this series, please visit the NES Mod Index.

 

There are lots of ways to add composite output to an NES Toploader, but it seems like every time I wanted a useful guide on how to do it (yes, it’s come up more than once for me) there just really isn’t one that has all the useful information I need all in one place.  This led me to creating my own.  Welcome to my NES Toploader AV Mod tutorial.  The first steps in the process should all happen way before you start any work on the project.  Specifically, being a good boy scout and getting prepared first is a great place to start.

In this case, being prepared covers the basics of tools and parts and some of the shopping you will need to do to successfully complete this project.  I will not be explaining what I call the super-basics.  For example, if you have no idea how to solder things, don’t even start this project because all you’ll do is destroy your NES Toploader.

For simplicity, I will assume the following:

  • You are are able to use the all tools involved without hurting yourself.
  • You own a functioning NES Toploader.
  • You own a soldering iron and know how to use it.
  • You have enough solder to do this project.
  • You have enough wire to do this job.
  • You own wire strippers and know how to use them.
  • You have some electrical tape handy.
  • You have an X-Acto knife or similar razor blade tool.
  • You have a drill, appropriately sized drill bits, and know how to use them.

First, a note on prices.  All prices I mention here are solely provided to give you an idea about what this project will cost.  If you are discovering this blog several years after I wrote it, you can bet the prices will all be wrong.  In other words, take them with a grain of salt.

If you do not own an NES Toploader, you should definitely stop here.  Get yourself to your local video game shop and see if they have one.  Note that I’m not referring to your local big chain video game store here.  They won’t have one, I’ll save you the trip.  I’m referring to that guy that has a small store in the back row of some strip mall that isn’t even visible from the road and probably also sells comic books.  Try not to get your hopes up too high though.  NES Toploaders are quite rare and the odds are that your local guy won’t have one either.

Your best bet if your local guy doesn’t have one is ebay.  Just search for “NES Toploader” and you should find a decent number of them available.  Remember to read carefully and that in most cases you actually do get what you pay for.  If it’s on sale for $40 there’s a good chance it doesn’t work and since this isn’t a tutorial about how to fix it, I recommend you find a different one.  I recently purchased one to produce this tutorial with from ebay for about $150 with a few games and a couple dogbone controllers, so you should expect to spend something near that price point.

The next thing you will need is a fancy screw driver that will grant you access to the guts of your NES Toploader.  It’s not expensive, but without it you will find yourself denied access pretty handily because all the normal screwdrivers you have sitting around your basement just won’t do the job.  In fact, most security bit sets are missing the shape you need for this.  I’ve created my own tool for this job in the past, but I’m not even going to tell you what I did because buying the proper tool is so superior it’s just not worth it.

I purchased this screwdriver set from Console5 and love it.  The bigger 4.5mm one is for getting into the NES itself and the smaller 3.8mm one is for getting into the games.  At the time I am writing this, the pair of tools is only $4.95 and I had a perfectly lovely experience purchasing from Console5 so I recommend going with them.

Next you will need to purchase a small pile of electronics bits.  For almost all of my electronics bits purchases over the years I have used Tayda Electronics.  They have a massive selection of interesting parts, obscenely low prices, and ship relatively quickly if you are in the USA.  I highly recommend buying electronics parts from them and I have purchased from them at least a dozen times.  For the RCA Jacks that you need for this project, I no longer recommend Tayda Electronics because the ones they sell are obscenely cheap.  They will work, but they are a pain to deal with because they are so cheaply made.  My new recommendation for high quality RCA Jacks is that you go through Minute Man Electronics.  I purchased my replacement RCA Jacks from them and greatly prefer the quality ones.

On the note of wire, electrical tape, and razors…  Strictly speaking, the razor is not required, but I feel it makes a better final circuit board to trim off the extra unused portion.  Electrical tape isn’t technically required either, but I like it better than other choices like packing tape or masking tape because it’s stickier and much harder to accidentally poke small holes through with sharp electronics bits.  If you do not use electric tape, be absolutely certain that you have some sort of non-conductive tape handy to prevent shorting out the circuit board on the grounded shielding inside the NES.  For wiring, I highly recommend the 4-conductor intercom wire from Radio Shack.  The wire is solid instead of stranded so you won’t make random electrical connections by accident, 24 gauge so it’s thick enough to be sturdy and thin enough to be flexible, and conveniently both of the connections you will need to make for this project require exactly 4 wires.  If by the time you are attempting this project there is no such thing as Radio Shack and you can’t find anyone else that makes 4-conductor wire, it’s not required that the wires be stuck together.  Just use 4 separate 24 gauge solid wires in different colors.

The way I do this project is a little bit of “overkill” but I like the results and I like how everything is good and clean and modular when I’m done.  I buy a little circuit board, nice little connectors, and triple the parts I actually need.  Yes, triple.  The reason is simply that mistakes happen.  I’m actually pretty good at this sort of thing and I still occasionally mess something up and it’s good to have spares.  With the prices of all the parts in question, you actually have to buy at least 3 of everything to even hit the $5.00 minimum purchase amount anyway, so it’s hardly a waste.

The list of parts you will need to build the circuit:

Now add 3 times the number shown above of each thing to your cart and you should just clear the $5.00 mark.  Keep in mind that you buy the resistors in sets of 10 so there is no need to triple those.  Of course if you are confident in your ability to build the circuit without error and find other interesting things on the site, you can definitely fill in the $5.00 minimum order with fancy things that are unrelated to this project.  Also, the very last item on the list (the 0.01 μF 50V Ceramic Disc Capacitor) is on the list because it’s possible to damage the ones on the NES motherboard by accident because they are close to other areas you’ll be working in.  I’ve accidentally destroyed one, and I didn’t have one to replace it with at the time.  The result was a flaky NES and my friend coming back so I could fix my error once the part came in.

At this point you should be all set to go (or at least waiting for a few deliveries that will leave you all set to go once they arrive).  Next we will describe the circuit you are building.

 

To jump between posts in this series, please visit the NES Mod Index.

NES Toploader AV Mod – Background

To jump between posts in this series, please visit the NES Mod Index.

 

This is a multi-part blog post taking you through the adventure of adding composite audio and video (AV) output to your NES Toploader.  The first part is the background on NES Toploaders and a bit of information about why you would want to modify yours in the first place.  Starting from the beginning I realize it’s possible you don’t even know what an NES Toploader is.  If you are a child of the 80s there is a good chance you’ve seen, played, and owned a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).  There is also a very good chance it looked like this:

IMG_0033

This is often referred to as the NES “toaster”.  I imagine that name came from the fact that you insert game cartridges that look rather like gray pieces of toast into the front of a device that slightly resembles a toaster oven.  While it was without question the best video game system of its time, the hardware didn’t hold up amazingly well as it aged.  Specifically there was a security chip in the system that relied on a good clean connection to another security chip in the cartridge.  When these two chips couldn’t talk to each other especially well (dirty connectors on the cartridge, old 72-pin connector in the NES, cosmic radiation, whatever) the result was a blinking screen that prevented you from playing your game.

This in turn translated into the famous patterns of blowing on your game cartridges or wiggling them around in the NES until they worked.  Everyone had a different approach to this and every NES seemed to like a different pattern.  Some people blew on the games through their shirts, others wiggled the game and nestled it all the way to the left before pushing it down, some required different amounts of time pressing the reset button, others spent money on cleaning devices and weird chemical concoctions.  Whatever your approach was for getting your games to work, the underlying problem was actually the same.  The security chips couldn’t talk to each other properly.

The eventual solution for this problem was for Nintendo to produce an all new type of NES.  The fancy new model looks like this:

IMG_0051

This cheaper and smaller system tried to address several problems at once.  First, the security chip was removed.  That means there is no chip in the system that needs to talk to the games anymore and thus there could not be a failure to do so.  (Good bye blinking screen!)

Second, the zero insertion force 72-pin connector from the toaster style NES was replaced with a straight in connector like what you would find on essentially every other cartridge based video game console created at that time.  (Games now insert into the top of the system instead of the front.)  Here is the dreaded 72-pin connector from a toaster style NES:

72pin_connector

Third, the square edged controllers were replaced with considerably more comfortable “dogbone” style controllers.  Imagine a Super Nintendo controller with less buttons.  This is a comparison of the two controller styles.  The original is on the left and the newer dogbone style is on the right.

controller_comparison

Finally, to make the system cheaper, they removed composite video output.  (Wait, what?  Yes, they really did.)  This image shows all of the outputs on both a toaster style NES and a toploader.  The back of the toploader (top) has three things.  From left to right they are the channel 3 or 4 switch, the RF output, and the power input.  The toaster style (bottom) has composite audio output and the composite video output on the side and then on the back it has the power input, the channel 3 or 4 switch, and the RF output.

IMG_0135

One of the side effects of removing the composite output is that it now had to be hooked up to your TV through a single wire using an RF signal.  (Radio Frequency, often referred to as cable or antenna input on your TV.)  This resulted in video quality issues that were common back in the days of the Atari (and less noticeable because the graphics were horrible to begin with), but that you likely hadn’t seen in a very long time on your NES.  If you had both a toaster style NES and a toploader to compare to, you likely noticed that the video quality was way worse on your toploader.  Everything was blurry and noisy (a side effect of combining the audio and video together to go down the line as an RF signal) and worse, for reasons I can’t fully explain, there were now “jailbars” in the picture.

Jailbars are vertical lines in the picture where variances in color produce visual artifacts.  This seemed to be especially obvious in large areas of blue.  What was intended as a uniform blue sky, for example, would look like a mess of blue vertical stripes of at least two different blues.  In a word, it is hideous and distracting.  Which I suppose is actually two words, but you get the idea.  It wasn’t good.

This is a side by side comparison of the actual video coming from a toploader both before and after the mod.  Before is on the left and after is on the right.

smb1_before_and_after

The good news is that adding AV output (specifically composite output) to an NES Toploader is actually a relatively simple operation.  The better news is that with a little bit of “potentially destroying your NES” you can get rid of the obnoxious jailbars at the same time.  (Don’t worry, it’s both optional, and no where near as scary as it sounds.)  If you want to play NES games with pretty video and without the flaky behavior of a toaster style NES, read on.  I’ll walk you through every step with as many useful pictures as I can capture.

 

To jump between posts in this series, please visit the NES Mod Index.

NES Toploader AV Mod – Disclaimer

To jump between posts in this series, please visit the NES Mod Index.

 

As fair warning, loads of things can go wrong.  Please be careful!

What I’m providing here are step by step instructions, lists of parts, and loads of pictures about how to modify your NES Toploader.  I’m not providing any warranty what-so-ever that you or your toploader will still work when you are done.  You assume ALL risk involved in following the instructions provided here.  Every effort has been made to ensure these directions are as complete and accurate as possible, but legal errors in this disclaimer or errors in any other part of these posts does not put me at fault.

Simply put, I’m not responsible for anything that goes wrong.

 

I highly recommend you read the entire NES AV Mod series of posts before you start.  Doing so will help you to understand the steps involved as well as why I do them in the order that I do.  Once you start, I suggest you avoid jumping around in the process because that’s an excellent way to mess something up or to miss a step entirely by accident.

With that said, I have done the AV mod successfully four times now.  I’ve done it both for myself and for friends, I wish you the best of luck and success in your efforts.

 

To jump between posts in this series, please visit the NES Mod Index.

1 … 3 4 5 6