The Battle for Battle City

Well, I spent all night tonight putting the finishing touches on my secret project.

As you may or may not be aware, NES games and Famicom games are extremely similar in nature but they have a different number of connector pins, and thus some kind of adaptor is needed to play one type of game on the other hardware.

There are also certain NES games that are basically just a converter with a Famicom game inside. This was apparently done due to a shortage on NES boards for some holiday season. As such, if you got a hold of one of those, you could switch the enclosed Famicom game and you'd have a method of playing Famicom games on an NES.

It sounds easy in theory, at any rate. The game I wanted to convert is Battle City, a classic arcade game that has never been available in America in any form despite being totally in English.

The first challenge was to get the games apart. NES games are easy since they have screws, but Famicom games are designed with all sorts of tabs that fit into each other, clearly never meant to be opened. I had to use a lot of prying and sawing to get Battle City Open.

Here are the two carts side by side. I already removed the original famicom game.

Now I just had to put them together. This requires a lot more force than you might think.

Here is the assembled unit.

So we're done now, right? Wrong. First of all, the case wouldn't shut - you can see a little plastic piece that goes through the middle of the famicom cart on the grey NES case in the first shot. This doesn't go in the right place for Battle City, so I had to snip it off.

After closing the case, I tried out the game, and it gave me the purple screen of death. I took it back apart, cleaned both the NES and the Famicom games until the pins sparkled, and still nothing.

The problem is actually that the Famicom cart was UPSIDE-DOWN. Yes, it looks normal in the second picture, the chips face the front of the cart like every other NES game and like the Famicom game that was originally in there, but it's wrong. Namco manufactures their chips facing the other way, I assume only to confuse you. You clearly weren't meant to get the game open.

This is the way it needed to go.

This worked first try (of course).

So in the end, I got my NES cart that plays Battle City, but man, it was a lot of work. And expensive. I don't really want to say how much this project cost in total, but suffice it to say it probably would have been substantially easier and cheaper just to get one of those "1000 in 1" pirate carts that always contain this game.

Oh well, Classic Gaming is always a labour of love. And intense frustration.

(I apologize for the poor picture quality. Gaming is where my skill lies, not photography.)