It sounded pretty straightforward: just disassemble your NES and remove the connector, boil it in a pot of water for 20-30 minutes, scrub out any remaining debris with a toothbrush, NES cleaner, or a clean cartridge, let it sit to cool back to normal temperature, and finally put your NES back together. So, since I have at least four or five NES units that don’t work, I decided that this was the project for me. I looked into it a little further and sure enough, this has been a popular fix for a while now, with a number of YouTube videos covering the process.

All have worked to varying degrees.īut Zac was telling me that actually boiling the connector not only loosens and cleans any dirt and buildup from the pins, but actually restores the pins back to their original shape with no manual bending required. There have been all kinds of ways to deal with it, from cleaning kits to removing the connector and re-bending the pins by hand to the aforementioned replacement connectors.

So as pretty much everyone knows by now, the cause of the most common NES malfunctions - the console not reading games and/or the power blinking on and off - is the cartridge connector pins getting dirty and bent after the NES’ “zero insertion force” (aka “the toaster”) mechanism has endured years of use. Boiling? Like literally boiling the connector in water? While discussing replacement of the infamous 72-pin connector that seemingly causes 90% of NES problems, he told me about the boiling method, and how it can yield even better results than installing new aftermarket connectors. Recently I was talking to my friend Zac at his shop, Press Start Games, about methods of getting original NES hardware back to working order.

Nintendo nes cleaner