Restoring the 90s

Yes, I'm still alive. Railfanning seems to have died completely though, and I'm not saying that with bitterness or anything. But just about anything that comes by here seems modern and boring, except for the 103, but shooting the same locomotive over and over again does get repetitive. And with most of the day being spent at work doing science, there isn't that much motivation left to grab the camera.

I have however discovered retro gaming as a hobby, and have managed to build a perfect SNES from three non perfect units. One was immaculate as far as the case goes, mint condition, unblemished and not yellowed, while it did require a few on-off switchings before my flash cart would properly power up. Another was very discolored on the outside, but very healthy on the inside, firing up right away, while the third one, while having the newest board revision, seems to have a broken DMA channel, with the SD2SNES menu not working and some games having issues. The case was sort of in between the two others, not perfect, but not strongly yellowed either.

So what I did was a circular switch of the main circuit boards across all three consoles, with the best looking unit receiving the most reliable board, the one in the middle the second best one, and the most discolored one getting the somewhat faulty board. It was quite interesting to see inside these things, seeing the hefty mechanism of the cartridge ejector, as well as the difference between the old "big board" and the more modern version that incorporates several chips into one, as seen in the bottom left image. This also gave me a chance to take apart the top half of the case (top right), with some vigorous scrubbing getting rid of decade old dirt that settled in all the little nooks and crannies. In the end, the at first reluctant board also fired up on first try, leaving me with two perfectly working units, one of which is in mint condition as far as the exterior goes (bottom right). The bad board and the bad case were also put back together (right side top left) and are still capable of playing most games, but not suitable for use with the SD2SNES flash cart.

And I have to say, the flash cart is the best thing ever!



Yes, it's quite expensive for something you can only use with one specific old console, but you have pretty much the entire library of SNES games in one cartridge! Though I admit, the choices are overwhelming sometimes, and there are quite a few sports games that I don't care about at all. But all the good ones are also there, from Super Mario to Donkey Kong, from F-Zero to Super R-Type, from Secret of Mana to Darius Twin (my fave so far), there's something for just about every taste! And I love the old, fast paced side scrolling shooter, despite some of the games being extremely hard by today's standards!

I actually rediscovered a much older game that I used to play on an arcade machine back in the 90s, which was in the basement of a small guesthouse in a tiny ski region. The area has since then lost its patrons, the lifts have been dismantled, the guesthouse demolished, the machine probably having been trashed. But the memories live on...