The Kingdom of Philtopia

On the weekend I was at the St Jacobs market and there was a retro gaming booth with all sorts of goodies. He had some NES carts and some SNES, N64 and gameboy. I didn’t find anything I really wanted in the cart bin as I do have most of the games I want already but I did notice he had a variety of replacement controllers for various systems.

I asked him if he had NES and sure enough he pulled a box out from under the counter “$10” done deal.

I got the controller home and unboxed it. It is a fairly accurate replica. The only thing off were the start/select buttons which were plastic instead of rubber.

The feel of the controller is very accurate, it feels like I am holding a NES controller in my hand and it appeared to respond fairly well. The only way to be sure of this however was the speed bike test

Battletoads

The Battletoads speed bike level is probably the fastest level in any NES game that I have ever played so if I could make a decent run at it then the controller passes my test.

I got to the last part of the level where it gets insanely fast and the alerts stop and I made it about 2/3’s of the way. I haven’t been able to beat this since I entered my 30’s so that counts as a pass for me.

NES

So my Nintendo now is coming up on 25 years old but it is still running strong. About 12 years ago I opened it up and pulled up all the cart pins with a flat head eyeglass screw driver to restore proper contacts and I cleaned the inside of it. The carts are harder to get in and out now but the connection is perfect.

The only odd thing I have to do is get it to rest about halfway up/down in the cart bay as all the way down or all the way up won’t run the game so I have an SD card container propped in the system. It’s weird but it works.

If you have an NES and have any unusual ways of keeping it running please comment below I would love to hear about it.