(Updated) I modded a Honeybee (NES-FC) adapter

[Tanooki | 4,939]

Old post is below:

I dug up a picture of what can be done to upgrade a Honeybee to the level of a legit Nintendo made FC adapter in those early carts.  I went and grabbed a thrashed copy of NES baseball for $5 and returned with it.  It was a bit taxing trying to be very careful but using a mix of needly tweezers, flux paste, solder, soldering iron I was able to first pop the CIC chip off the old Nintendo PCB without bending/breaking the pins on the chip.  From there I went and gutted (see images below) the garbage bypass shock setup the Honeybee has and stripped the board clean other than the connector itself since it has a CIC row of pins where that bodge of garbage had rested.

Going back on was a lot faster, smoother.  Cleaned any holes that needed a little clearance, re-pasted the entire area, and then slowly using the needly tweezers threaded the little legs of the chip into the holes it was intended for.  From there fluxed, soldered, and gave a little to each, any that came up a little less than ideal from the chip side fed just a little more into the hole to be firm ...and done.

Or not... that spot I saw also showed how to run a wire from a pin from the adapter(FC side) to the NES 72pin side to allow for expansion audio.  So quite quickly tinned a little solder in two places for a surface, then I cut a piece of wire exposing just a little metal on each end, laid that down, soldered a little clean ball to both sides, and tested it out... worked perfectly as it should then properly screwed it shut.

The pisser... SMAS still acting all stupid.  I think I must have some variation of the CPU in there that it just hates on.  I saw some comments about that when trying to this fix that there were factory variations in the chip that don't trigger legit games but can piss off unlicensed and bootlegs possibly on the more complex side like this one.  Oh well.

Now I just need to go get Voltaurs drop in 2 spot solder 1 wire expansion audio mod micro PCB for my action set and I'm set up for good.

 

 

--Original post --

That Mario Allstars unique issue I'm having on my (cut pin 4 10NES aside) stock action set NES I did a little more investigating on.  A couple months back I got another FC adapter in a broken in the mail 260in1 golden game cart, PCB was done done, but salvaged its adapter and the shell.  I tried that game with SMAS and it got even more wonky.  It got me thinking, went to the discord for here and was tipped off (didn't realize it, never looked that hard) the honeybee sends a pulse to fry the lockout, so it doesn't have a legit bypass to the CIC say like Tengen cooked up.

I did a dig on google, came up with just one solitary post going back between 15-20 years ago on NESDEV forums about the adapter.  I did look and yes, the Honeybee is bodged to hell but also the PCB has traces and pinholes for a legit CIC chip!  The post sadly had a terrible 800x? photo and a sketchy description saying they took the scary stuff off the board and put the CIC in and it's functionally identical to the Nintendo bypass board from 1985.

The thing is, I looked at the Nintendo board, it is a CIC but has also one other resistor on it.  The modder didn't show this, only adding a red wire from pin to pin(top-bottom) for expansion audio.

 

Can I just slide all this crap off the board seen here, clean it up nice and tight and find a sacrificial awful cart to use as a victim to make this honeybee right?  The thing is my SMAS cart works on a sketch-o FC Mobile88 clone handheld too along with my HiDefNES kit modded top loader(using the honeybee as is with a slight jiggle on the menu.)

 

Edited June 15, 2023 by Tanooki