A few months ago, I traded a couple Pokemon 3DS games for a super neat famiclone in the box. It was mostly complete, but it didn’t turn on when I tried a game. Bummer.
So, I pulled it apart. It’s not uncommon for the voltage regulator to go bad on these, so I tested it with my meter. Sure enough, it was dead. So I replaced it with another.
It lives! I was pretty impressed with how well it worked.. But I couldn’t leave “good enough” alone. I noticed the common jailbar effect from electrical noise, and wanted to try to reduce the effect. So, I popped that sucker open again to make a Faraday cage and add a filter cap to the board to reduce noise. It didn’t reduce it completely, but it worked pretty well over all!
I made a faraday cage tied to ground on the top of the board.
I also also put on a filter cap. While I was examining this board, I noticed it was almost an exact clone of an actual Famicom. It’s also socketed.
I’m going to try transplanting an actual NES CPU and PPU into this.. And see what happens!