I just received a Sharp Twin Famicom with a non-working drive. From my preliminary inspection, I found the following problems:
1. The female power plug recepticle is loose, I have to press it down to get it to boot up.
2. The FDS drive is not working
3. There were missing screws to hold the cover together.
4. There were bite marks on the Player controllers. It looks like a child bit them
5. The case had animal hair and cigarrete ashes
Other than the bite marks, I can either repair or clean the parts. I suspect this is not going to be bad at all. The main Famicom cartridge unit works flawlessly.
I inspected the FDS drive and the belt is melted and stuck together. This is a very common problem and can easily be repaired with a belt change and manual adjustment of the FDS drive motor.
The controllers are 100% fully functional but they visually look awful. I may replace them with some spare controllers from an old Famicom that I have.
The female power plug connections need to be reflowed with new solder. It is really easy to do with the right tools.
I included pictures to show my findings. Look for more updates on this fun little project to restore the famicom twin to its full glory.
-CFB
The belt on the FDS drive was stretched and sticky. I removed the belt and replaced it. While I inspected the drive, I found out this was the First Famicom Drive that contained the 7201 Drive controller chip. What does this mean? It means one can use FDSLoader and write to the drive. So, I can dump disks as well as write to the FDS disk. Pretty cool.
However, all is not done though. When I tested the drive, I was getting a Disk Error 22. I adjusted the speed down but still the same error. I proceeded to try and adjust the Disk Head. Well, wouldn't you know, the adjustment screw was stripped! I had a useless drive.
Well, not totally useless, I stripped the controller electronics from the drive and replaced the copy-protected electronics on another one of my FDS drive. I tested it an it works. I just have to make the cable to read/dump FDS disks.
I had an extra FDS drive that I was planning to trade or sell on ebay. I took the drive out of that one and installed it into the Twin Famicom. It works!
So, now I try and figure out what is wrong with the power supply female plug Here is a picture below.
I inspect the solder connections and low and behold, there is a crack and peel on the pcb. The trace is coming off. This makes sense though. I could only get the Twin to power up when I pushed down on the plug. I had to do this to make contact with the board. It looks like I have to run some jumpers.
Here is the bad trace. You can see where it peeled.
And here is where I soldered some wire jumpers.
I tested it and it powered up fine! I am almost done.
So now, I have to clean all the cigarette ashes and cat/dog hairs. I decided just to gut the Twin of its parts and wash the case. I basically took a sponge with palmolive and cleaned the case like I was cleaning dishes. The case cleaned up nicely.
See!
I then reassembled all the components and tested each component to make sure it was working.
Here it is all clean and ready to go.
ANd here it is all sealed up and ready to play!
Now, I am done. Overall it was a great project and now I have 2 working Twin Famicom Black and Red. I was kind off bummed about the FDS drive but I was able to salvage the drive electronics for my FDSLoader project. So, it really is not that hard to refurbish one of these babies. So the next time you see a non-working Twin Famicom on ebay, bid on it and refurbish it. You just might see me bidding on it as well.
-CFB
