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SideQuesting

April 16, 2011

8-Bit Week: How Did You Fix Your NES?

More articles by Dalibor Dimovski »

Written by: Dalibor Dimovski
Tags: 8-bit week, cartridge, nes, nintendo, repair

First you blow, then you wiggle.

It sounds kinky, but that’s how I fixed my NES every time I got the (original) blue screen of death when my Nintendo games were too dirty to work. We also had habits of shoving paper in the port, setting a second cart on top of the first, and flipping over the entire thing to get it to work. Regardless of what we did in our home, every one of our friends did something different. It was like a secret handshake that everyone did wrong.

The video above shows several methods of jamming Mario into the gray box, and we can’t help but get a little nostalgic.

A few more similarly-themed vids after the break as well.

About the Author

Dalibor Dimovski

Dali is the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of SideQuesting, as well as the co-Founder of CarDesignFetish and the founder of MakLink. Dali is also a car designer, deejay, and introductory beer-brewer.

More articles by Dalibor Dimovski »

Alexander Bevier

I used to sacrifice virgins over my NES to get it to work. Turns out NES’ don’t work well around virgin blood.
http://www.ArmlessOctopus.com Dave Voyles

Alex, I think that’s the only trick which routinely works. My grandmother has had her NES since launch and still has it plugged into her TV to beat Zelda and Super Mario Bros. for the nth time. I should probably ask her what kind of voodoo magic she performs in order to keep a NES working after 25 years.
Rob Podell

Just random comment: There was a top down racing game for NES, forget the name of it, where you drove little indy cars. For some reason that game had a bad ability to check if the game was working, so it would load, even if the data was bad. What am I getting at? My friends and I would spit into the cartridge, and put dirt in it, then try to get it to work. After a couple minutes of trying, it would load, and we would be treated to totally insane screwed up race tracks, with puddles in the middle of the track, tornadoes that would flicker and appear randomly all over, and sometimes the track would be completely screwed so you couldn’t even make a lap.

Good times.
http://vin2d.blogspot.com/ John A. Frye

Complete disassembly of the NES and cleaning with cotton swabs and rubbing alcohol. Clean contacts and you’re good to go.