Upgrading the NES Toploader with the best video! NESRGB 4.0 install guide and demonstration

hey guys welcome back to fix a Friday so this week we're going to be working on one of my favorite versions of the NES which is the top loader so the top loader was released by Nintendo North America and also in Japan known as the AV famicom and it was around um you know the end of the nes's lifespan like around 93 94 or something like that and so it is way smaller than the standard front loader toaster as you guys can see here but it has a pretty big disadvantage which is that it has RF out only so it's really kind of a shame because like on the one hand Nintendo finally got the loading mechanism right this one doesn't have the blinking red light and all the issues that the original version has however it's got a huge video drawback um you know and especially if you live in a very urban area you get all sorts of interference and the overall experience isn't that great so what we're going to be doing today is installing this so this is Tim worthington's latest revision of the NES RGB the nesrgb 4.0 and it has a whole bunch of features including in-game reset and the ability to change up to six different palettes by using button combinations so it's a pretty nice upgrade as compared to the older revisions so let's go ahead and take this thing apart and install the NES RGB okay so before I start doing the mod I thought it would be useful just to show you what the original experience was like with the NES top loader so right now I have my flash cartridge installed in the console and I just have this menu brought up here only because I wanted to show you one of the really big issues with the top loader and that is the jail bars that it has so if you look at you know this little box here in the center it's supposed to be a solid gray but it's definitely not solid gray as you can see in the image here there are these vertical lines going through any solid color and so it's really really obvious on the top alert there's all this video noise this is true even if you do a composite video mod I mean it helps a little bit but you know not that much so the gel bars was a really big issue even back then with the top loader and then let me go ahead and just load up Super Mario Brothers here and yeah you can see that there's you know just kind of like color fringing and just an overall blurriness and I'm using a uh a flat panel here I'm not using a CRT I think the CRT would help a little bit but overall you're still going to get an experience that's very similar to this um yeah so again I um I think that doing this mod makes a really huge Improvement because then you get composite video s video RGB component and all of those look better than this all right so let's go ahead and take the console apart and get started okay so taking apart the top loader is actually really simple all you need is a game bit screwdriver and a standard phillips and with that you can just take off the top shell and the top RF shield and here is what the board looks like so it's really nice I mean the design is super compact you've got your CPU over here and we've got our PPU which is the graphics chip over here and this is actually where we're going to be starting our journey here we're going to be desoldering this chip this is definitely the hardest part of the installation and normally when I'm desoldering a large chip like this I use three different steps to do so the first step is I'll flip it over and I'll add fresh solder to all of these pads here this just helps loosen things up and it makes it easier to remove all of the solder and then I'll come in with my haco desoldering gun and that will end up removing probably about you know 90 percent of the solder that's holding all these pins in place and then the final step is that I'll take a hot air gun and I have it set to about 300 or so Celsius and then I'll just pass it over all of these pins and just kind of loosen up the last little bits of solder that are holding it down and then very gently just kind of lift the chip out and that works extremely well for me um it's very rare that I have any issues with Vias or or any kind of damage that occurs as a result of that and it's very you know very consistent reliable so yeah that's what we're going to go ahead and do right now laughs [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] okay so the PPU has been removed and I didn't have any issues with the Vias all of them are intact and nothing got lifted or damaged in any sort of way and then from there I went ahead and installed this Precision pin socket that comes with the kit so now what we've got to do is assemble the stack of the NES RGB and this adapter board so this little adapter is necessary because without it the NES RGB actually would just sit like right here and it would jut out of the shell so so what this does is it just kind of sits over here and shifts everything over to the left a little bit so that everything can fit inside of the case so it's a little bit tricky to do this if you do it in the wrong way you can actually really mess things up big time so what I like to do first is build up part of the adapter board by you know taking these Precision pin um headers and installing them into the socket these also come with the kit and then I'm going to go ahead and start by by soldering this into place and then we're going to go ahead and work on the NES RGB board and get um these little shorter headers installed onto it and then also get another socket installed here [Music] [Applause] thank you Okay so we've got the NES RGB board set up with the shorter pins on the um on these two rows right here and then we've got our Precision pin socket installed as well and this one's also set and it has the longer Precision pin headers installed so now all we've got to do is just put them together so we're just going to Simply line them up and go ahead and do the final little bit of soldering okay so all of our main soldering is now finished for the NES RGB and you can see it right here and I also went ahead and closed a few jumpers off camera that are also necessary for the mod one is right here j3 this supplies power to the board J5 is closed because this is an ntsc console and then we're closing jumper J1 because we're going to use button combos to switch pallets and do the in-game reset and finally jumper J10 is closed because we are going to use the de Jitter function that is present on the nesrgb this is something you should do if it's a North American console or a Japanese console okay so all of that is taken care of um and so now what we're going to be doing is we need to um remove two more components we're going to get rid of this uh Power connector here we're also going to get rid of the RF modulator and that's because this 3D printed part is going to go here in its place and that is going to have a power jack and it's also going to have a Super Nintendo multi-out and this is going to carry all of our video and audio signals um so once that's all installed we also have to flip over the board and we're going to install um four wires in this region over here and that's going to be for the in-game reset all right so let's go ahead and start by removing these two components [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign ahead and done some very basic wiring off camera and I just wanted to show you uh the way I have this Super Nintendo style multi-out setup so this PCB is quite helpful because it actually labels what goes where in case you need it but I'm also going to put a link in the description that shows you how to wire up this multi-out correctly so that it's compatible with all Super Nintendo style cables so um the way I have it labeled here is color coded I always use that kind of wire because it just makes life easier for this sort of thing so we've got our audio here and this the NES does mono sound only so it's going to be doing dual mono to the left and right speakers so these two are together this um lighter color here this lighter red color is our 5 volts this yellow here is our composite video white over here is Luma this brown is chroma these two pins right here are both ground so they're tied together with this black wire and then I've got RGB for red green and blue and finally csync which is this darker gray wire right over here again I'm going to have that listed in the description that's a much easier way to follow along but yeah I just wanted to show you how I set up this whole multi-out connector and then we also have the board itself and I've installed four wires on the underside so you can see that three of them uh go over here to player one and you can see that I've attached them to these three pads right over here and then finally I have this purple wire here and this is tied to the reset button this is actually physically where the reset button is located so these three wires are connected to the clock latch and the data lines on on player one so what I'm going to do is connect those up to the nesrgb board and you can see I have them all pointing this way that's because there's a spot under the shell right where the power switch is which is cut open so it means that you can easily route these wires underneath without getting them caught on anything or not having to cut the shell of the console so so yeah so that's what we have all set up here and now the next step really is just to solder in two wires so that we can bring audio in to the nesrgb okay so the last two wires that we need to install are so that we can tap into the audio so the audio comes from the CPU here and you can get it on pins one and two right here but it's far easier just to tap in on these two resistors right here so this one is R4 and it goes to pin one and R5 and it goes to pin two so I'm going to go ahead and attach two wires to that okay so we're all set here so this white wire here this is going to go to pad B on the NES RGB board and this light gray wire over here is going to go to pad a once we get everything all set up so yeah at this point it's kind of like a spaghetti monster mess of wires so um the next thing I'm going to do is actually partially rebuild the top loader and then we're going to make the final connections and give it a test okay so I have got the Nintendo more or less assembled completely at this point um and you can kind of see why I had to do it this way so when you insert the NES RGB there's actually a screw right underneath it so if you really want to save all of the screws which I did you kind of have to build it like this with all the wires just hanging out ready to be connected and then put this on and do the final connections this is one reason why if you can get the voltar qsb specifically for the top loader it makes things really nice because then you can just easily plug it and unplug it from the multi-out here is the multi-out by the way and you can see that it came out really nice it's all plugged in and looking good um so yeah now there's really only one thing left to do which is to wire everything up so I'm going to go ahead and do that really quick and then go over all the connections and then we'll give this thing a test foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] Okay so we've got the NES RGB all finished up and so I just wanted to go over these connections that we have here so most of these connections right here come straight from the multi-out they're the ones that we discussed beforehand and they're basically power ground and all of our video signals um right over here this purple wire this is the sound output from the NES RGB to the multi-out and these two wires right here these are the inputs from the CPU so this is pin one of the CPU otherwise known as pad a and pin 2 which is known as pad B so on this side over here we've got the the wires that go to controller Port 1 and also to the reset line and that gives us our in-game reset and Palette swapping so the purple wire right here that's reset and then for the um the three wires here the blue is clock the green is latch and then this silver one here is data and so that corresponds to the ports right here and so this is clock latch and data and you just match it up um and then finally yeah here's the the multi-out and it really looks very nice and it gives it a kind of professional original sort of look to it and so yeah now I'm going to go ahead and just close everything up and let's go ahead and give it a test all right so the top loader is all plugged in and so let's go ahead and power this thing on all right looking good so our everdrive is loading up just fine and I'm just gonna pick a game uh let's go ahead and do yeah let's do some Double Dragon I love this game [Music] all right so as you can see in here everything looks really sharp and crisp and it's looking perfect so now if I go ahead and I hold select and start and then just toggle through with left and right I can actually change the palettes so actually let me let me pause and then if I just go left and right like this you can see I go through all the different palettes now if I hold the right button down and select and start it brings me back to the default and if I also hold left select and start I can actually turn off the NES RGB altogether like this and then if I hold right select and start it comes back on and then finally to reset you just hit select Start A and B and that's it and I'm back to my main menu on my flash cartridge so yeah this installation was a success and hopefully as you guys can see it's a huge upgrade relative to the original RF output on the top loader and there's absolutely no jail bars whatsoever so you can see that these are solid gray lines there are no gel bars at all so it's a huge huge upgrade over the stock system all right so that's it for this week's video If you guys like this kind of content then consider subscribing to the channel I have videos out like this every week and of course if you have a console that you want repaired or modified you can reach me directly at oneuprestorations.com alright guys thanks very much for watching and I'll see you in the next one [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Long Island Retro Gaming

Views: 13,736

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Id: WhKlE08Muv4

Length: 19min 32sec (1172 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 13 2023