5 years ago

In this video, I share the story about how my HDMI modded top-loading NES died and the hero who saved it for me.
As we were ringing in 2019, I decided to hop on and do a stream for an hour or two to celebrate the occasion. I have had a lot of fun playing my HDMI modded top loader NES, so that's what we were playing on. I threw in a copy of Castlevania and set out to destroy Dracula.

About 45 minutes to an hour into the stream, something weird happened. The graphics started to flicker, they faded out here and there, but it kept playing. Then a little bit after that, the graphics went out altogether. I lost signal to my ElGato. I started to panic.
And that it happened. The graphics went out altogether. They came back but the color was wrong, and my screen was scrolling from right to left. I've had some issues with my HDMI mod previously, so I decided to switch up my machine from my NES to my Super NES for the rest of the stream.

Upon further inspection, everything looked okay to me. I decided to reflow the solder on all of the pens for the CPU and PPU to see if that would fix the problem. It didn't. In fact, once I did that I had no display whatsoever.
I reached out to Jason at Game-Tech.US, Voltare, and several other modders that I knew. none of them had any capacity to look at it, however, one of them did mention Chris over at Mobius Strip Tech as a possible option. I reached out to Chris and he was more than helpful in trying to diagnose things before I sent it to him. I couldn't figure out what was going on, so we decided it would probably be best to have him physically look at the machine.

The day he got my unit, he had it apart and already sent emails with photos indicating several issues. Some of the pins on the CPU we're bridged with solder. I'm sure if there wasn't a problem with the CPU beforehand, this definitely made things worse. He went through and tested the entire machine, I sent him spare parts, and he was able to get my unit back up and running. My CPU was shot, either from the issue that caused the graphics problem or finished off when I bridge the connections and then applied power. He also went through and cleaned up the machine entirely for me, something I really appreciate.

I cannot think Chris enough at Mobius Strip Tech for helping me out. He gave me a fair price, I actually paid him a little more because it was worth it. He did amazingly clean work, and he was patient with me with my questions. If you guys need any mod work done I would highly recommend you give him a shout.

The footage used in this review are used under the Fair Use laws, referenced below:

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The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
(Pub. L. 94–553, title I, § 101, Oct. 19, 1976, 90 Stat. 2546; Pub. L. 101–650, title VI, § 607, Dec. 1, 1990, 104 Stat. 5132; Pub. L. 102–492, Oct. 24, 1992, 106 Stat. 3145.)

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