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Famicom controllers have nice, metal faceplates, but they're prone to scratching, discoloration, and the paint flaking off. Even if you can find a new one, how do you replace it when the controller cables disappear into the back of the system?

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Show Notes:

The Famicom in this video has been seen before, although technically before Famicom Dojo existed.

If you watch our "Season 0" episode "Powet in Japan", you'll see a rather beat-up Famicom running the FDS in this video. In our first proper episode, you'll also see its insides in a photo. Quite unintentionally, this Denshimail has become a nice callback to the early days and history of Famicom Dojo.

We've also performed this bit of surgery on this poor, maligned machine before, but you wouldn't know it to look at it.

The Famicom that you've seen talking in nearly every episode since the show's inception was Sean's original, however when he first got it it didn't work. Vinnk and Sean picked up "Mr. Yamada"' not for its looks, but because its board worked great. (The controllers also may or may not have been better.) We opened both of them up -- that is where the photo of them both laying open comes from -- and swapped out all the necessary parts to make one working, pristine Famicom, and one that looks terrible and doesn't work at all.

(Sadly, the nicer Famicom hasn't worked in years, probably because an NES power adapter was accidentally plugged into it back in 2008 or so. That's why there is yet a third Famicom that has been featured on the show any time we've shown off the hardware since we've gone widescreen. It's actually a newer model too, with a few small differences from the original. We'll probably go over them some time.)

The point of this long story is that this entire video is quite a large in-joke -- scavenging the Famicom's Player 1 controller to replace Mr. Yamada's is a partial return to form for the latter, from before we created our two Frankenstein's monsters of consoles.

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