A long while back I received a Home Computer System Famiclone. What I didn't realize was that the chip that controls the controller input was dead, but the rest of the console worked perfectly fine. When I flipped the console on I was met with a multicart list of games, among which were Mortal Kombat and Street Fight 8-bit pirates. Knowing the console may take a while to fix, I painstakingly removed both ribbon cables holding the multicart board into the system and carefully, since I didn't have any desolder wick, smoothed out the solder as much as I could on all 60 contacts.
Originally I wanted to immediately jam the board into one of my home made Famicom to NES converters and test it out, but as I didn't do too well smoothing out all the solder on the contacts I decided I would go ahead and use one that I hadn't officially turned into a converter yet. After opening the cartridge I removed the Gyromite board and pushed in the pirated multicart board. Everything was going well until I heard a cringe worthy crunch, upon inspection I had gnarled up the inside of the converter.
With some slight adjustments I managed to get everything aligned enough so that it fit and worked perfectly. Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter are what you would expect in 8-bit, slow and kind of boring. The cartridge has many other games built in, but the most name worthy of all had to be the two demakes of well known 16-bit games.
After I pulled the cartridge from my NES I decided it would be best to just remove the Gyromite label and leave the whole thing together, there was no sense in making a converter with a board hanging out of it. Sadly since I was in a bit of a hurry to test out the cartridge, and slightly messed the converter up, I don't think I'll be able to pull them apart, even if I did it really wouldn't be worth it. Even though the cartridge was a 5 screw configuration I could only use 4, as the board covers up the one in the center, but with the 4 corners being screwed down I haven't had any issues.
It was a simple and small project, but well worth what little time it took. I'm thinking of making a label for the cartridge as well, just so it looks better than all grey. Strange to think now if I wanted to play this on a Famiclone I would need an NES to Famicom converter.
Hello, I'm not sure if you still read the comments on this page, but I want to thank you for this article. I still have some famiclones laying around which all stopped working, but are holding such cartridges on the bottom of their mainboards. I'm going to buy a famiclone adapter to try booting them up in my NES, I just needed confirmation that it could work in theory.
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I hope everything worked out! Thanks for the comment!
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