My Daughter and I haven’t hung out that much in the past. Last few weeks we decided to do stuff together. She brought up the Nintendo and I was like sure.
So Friday night I fired up the Nintendo and since I am a veteran of the system I let her go first. She has never played any of the old Mario games and she did very well. When it was my turn I was screwed. The gamepad I was using the B button would not respond. Decades of memorizing the jumps in Mario down the toilet. Reason being I memorized everything while Mario is running.
So yesterday I cracked open the gamepad and sure enough after 30 years of use the carbon track to the B button had a chunk missing. I was able to fix it by scrapping away the track solder mask and put in a bodge wire. It works once more.
For giggles I searched around for some NES-004 reproduction boards and I can’t find any. Just a bunch of reproductions of the NES itself and converting gamepads to USB. Currently eBay has plenty to offer for gamepad replacements but I know this will dry up in a year or two.
I plan to design a repro PCB. Kinda tempted to see about using a modern shift register as well. However Digikey still says the CD4021 is still active. I think the 74 series 165 is some what compatible but as a TTL and different pinout but it’s a Parallel in and Serial out.