Restoring the Famicom to its original beauty?

[Dieubussy]

Hello all,

I have a friend - in fact, ex-girlfriend - in Japan that sent me a Nintendo Famicom with lots of game cartridges she kept from her youth. However she lost the AC adaptor and the video cable.

I got the console today and tried it with a japanese super famicom AC adaptor but the image is mostly black and white. Is it even possible to use a Famicom with a standard PAL tv? Do I need to get any specific cable or AC Adaptor to play it?

Anyway, as I was accepting the fact that I might not enjoy the console playing the games, at least I could try to restore it to its original beauty. The console is in great shape, but all the images usually show the plastic as being white: well, in this case is mostly yellow. I thought about using some product to clean the console and remove this color. Does anyone have an idea on how to do this without causing the plastic any harm?

Thanks in advance!

[Max P.]

The yellowed plastic on Nintendos' is usually more than skin deep, it's a chemical change in the whole material - you cannot clean it (unless it really it a tobacco type stain instead of the normal Nintendo yellowing).

Check this:

http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/189

[honeymustard]

SFC adapter is fine. A lot of TVs display the Famicom in black and white for some reason, even if they support NTSC. My 37" LCD displays it in colour, but my small CRT doesn't (though it works with every other NTSC console). You might be interested in doing the AV mod to it which adds composite out. Easy to do and gives a nice picture.

For the yellowing, I accidentally got some super glue on mine, and wiped it off, and that looked it made a little bit of change, so maybe try something like that. Nail polish remover might work? Worth a try.

[Dieubussy]

Well, I had that same problem with other consoles. But with this one, it's just a shame to see it like this. I really hope that I can mend it somehow.

[honeymustard]

http://www.famicomworld.com/forum/index.php?topic=1691.0

There's a thread about restoring the colour. Haven't read it yet but it might have a solution.

[Dieubussy]

I think the best solution they presented in that thread was the bleach. Sandblaster, blowtorch, etc. seems to risky. Or maybe I'll ask my dentist how it is he can make yellow stained teeth go pearl white and use that same method with my console

Anyway, thanks for the help!

[noobish hat]

Yeah, sorry Bruno, apparently original famicoms just don't work on non-Japanese tvs :-(
If you do want to play the games you could either do the AV mod as honeymustard suggested or get an AV Famicom (that's what I did), although I guess you'd still need an ntsc tv to display it in colour.

[honeymustard]

AV Famicoms do work on the TVs that the regular Famicom doesn't. The AV mod doesn't fix the colour issue though :\

[Dieubussy]

Well, how hard is it to do the AV mod?

Do you know of any cables that enable the console to be played on PAL systems? I recall hearing someone mention it in the past.

Thanks for the precious help guys, I'd be lost withoutcha!

[honeymustard]

It's not hard at all, you just need basic soldering skills really. If you do the mod, you just need regular composite cables to connect it to a TV.. I assume that's what you mean?

[importaku]

Funnily enough old style famicoms do work on uk tv's however you need to be lucky as very few modern tv's accept the signal through the ariel socket.

My tv has the ability to go ntsc via every input including rf however the problem is you can't have picture & the sound as they are on separate frequencies so i can get a pictue but not the sound.

AV modding is the only easy way, you can also mod them to RGB but you need some hard to get parts to do it but the picture at the end is fantastic.

[Fastware]

The reason Famicoms do not work on UK TV's is that The crystal in the RF unit inside the Famicom is tuned to output and NTSC signal. If you have the right parts I'm sure you could change this component.

[honeymustard]

My tv has the ability to go ntsc via every input including rf however the problem is you can't have picture & the sound as they are on separate frequencies so i can get a pictue but not the sound.

Same here, same with the US toploader in fact.

[MattyD]

The difficulty of an AV mod really depends what version of the board is inside your Famicom. Mine was one of the really old ones, perhaps even one of the first run that was recalled for having some hardware faults, since all the mod guides I found online used other versions of the board.

For the most common version it's not that hard though. You only need a few components which costs pennies each from Maplin, and some basic soldering skills. It is in fact possible to simply wire up a point on the board to an RCA jack; however, the signal will be extremely weak so you will need to build a small transistor-gain amplifier on a piece of solder board and then connect it in between the two. There's a good guide to this in the workshop articles at www.famicomworld.com

The reason Famicoms do not work on UK TV's is that The crystal in the RF unit inside the Famicom is tuned to output and NTSC signal. If you have the right parts I'm sure you could change this component.

I only have a basic understanding of electronics theory but I'm pretty sure changing the crystal would mean you'd have to alter the output timing of the various ICs that feed into it? That's why PAL machines were slower - they couldn't be arsed to revise the hardware properly and just re-clocked the chips instead to make the machine output in 50hz.