Some of you know this, but for any newcomers, some time ago I purchased a copy of Chrono Trigger for the NES off of eBay. It was advertised as non-functional. The first three photos here were from the listing. Looking at that I could see what the issue likely was. Counting from left to right, the 4th, 7th, and 16th traces leading to the pin contacts on the back side were visibly broken.
When the cartridge arrived I opened it up, took the multimeter to test if the circuits were indeed broken (and that the other were fine). My initial judgement had been correct. Scratched off some of the green masking material and bridged the broken traces with a short length of wire (4th photo). Notched the plastic of the casing for the patch job to fit comfortably, and loaded it into the SNES to be greeted with a now functioning copy of the game with no save data.
Being a nearly 30 year old game, it'd be no surprise for the save battery to be dead, but I tried saving anyway. To my amazement, when I rebooted the console, the save file was still there! I don't know if being powered up at any time with those traces broken cleared the memory, or if this perhaps could even have been a factory defective cart that someone held onto for years. The only certainty is that this was a fully functioning copy of Chrono Trigger, which I got to experience my first ever playthrough of the game on.


You must log in to comment.