As I mentioned before, after getting my feet wet with soldering basics by practicing cartridge battery swaps, I decided to up the ante and try my hand at installing a basic N64 RGB amplifier since I bought a compatible console in Osaka a few months back. I'm embarrassed how long it took (mostly because I struggled more than I needed to with soldering some pins due to having too large of solder initially) and I ended up redoing the wiring after this initial photo to make them shorter and more compact when trouble initially reared its head after reassembling the console. (And I know my solder joints don't look too hot; the perks of using a hot iron with shaky hands.) But by god, despite it all, I did it, I managed to not burn my apartment down, and now have the crispest analog N64 signal money can buy!
Truth be told, unless you're REALLY picky about signal quality or need to capture archive quality footage, the upgrade over s-video, which the system can do natively with OEM cables, is generally pretty subtle. In some games, without fine tweaking upscaler settings, I'd be pretty hard pressed to tell the difference, although out of the ones I've tested so far, Densha de Go 64 does pop more, which is great as someone who loves the visuals of that era in the series. So I probably wouldn't recommend most people go out of their way to do this mod and just be content knowing s-video gets you most of the way there qualitatively.
But as an exercise in something I never thought I'd have the chops to do myself? Hell yeah, super glad I did it. Extremely gratifying to know I did that upgrade and definitely learned a lot of stuff that'll hopefully make me better and faster at soldering moving forward. Can't wait to do more on other systems! 