Note to tinkerers : Be careful soldering to batteries!

[gdement]

For what it's worth, I'm now pretty confident that battery holders work fine on NES carts. The only problem is getting them to fit.

I salvaged one from an old motherboard, but even using the smallest holder I could find I still had to sand it down.

 

Once installed, I then saved something to the game, tossed it around and dropped and shook it, and didn't lose any data. I've used it over the last few weeks and no problems yet.

 

Of the carts I've looked at so far, I noticed that they already have a capacitor on the battery, so that probably makes vibration a non-issue. One of my NES carts was 100uF and I think the other was 47uF.

[Video]

I do a lot of my own soldering work, but when it comes to small batteries, I useually do it the "beginner" way, you know, the inexperiance of a beginner as they heat only one metal and then drop the solder on it, to heat the tab and drop the solder on it and then close it on the battery. Thing is, it's a very week hookup done that way, but the battery doesn't get hot either, so it's relatively safe.

 

Honestly, unless something is wrong with it, the tab is supposed to hold the battery down without solder, though as it's almost always a different material, you'll need to take some emory paper and clean it when changing the battery or it will get bad connections.

 

You can do a search on Youtube for exploding batteries, some cool stuff there, and mostly caused by overheating, overcharging or puncturing.

 

BTW, with a cart as big as a NES, or SNES cart, a battery holoder, with wire leads would be perfect, as long as you solder the correct poles to the correct points, it really doesn't matter where in the cart you place, or to what you attach it. With NES, the carts are largely air, just attach to the cart shell plastic with epoxy and run a wire lead down to the cart itself.

Edited June 19, 2009 by Video