SNES Broken? Need help fixing it -- Google Fu not working

xerocalibur · Post by **xerocalibur** » Sat Aug 13, 2011 8:03 pm

Hey all, long time lurker short time poster. I have an SNES that has been in my family forever, and I want to be able to play it again, but it seems rather broken. Cosmetically, it looks fine. I have cleaned it using an official SNES cleaner from Nintendo which we happened to pick up back in the day, and some rubbing alcohol. However, some games seem odd when loading them. For instance:

Star Fox - Loads and plays fine

Super Mario World - Loads and will load save files, but some platforms seem to "jitter"

Super Metroid - Game saves would load, but the Save Room would be corrupted/graphics messed up and Samus would spawn in the floor, unable to move left or right.

Zombies Ate My Neighbors - Loads and plays but title cards for levels are messed up

Street Fighter Alpha 2 - Loads and plays but seems to pause a bit at certain moments and some SFX seem to not play

Legend of Zelda: ALTTP seems to load from save files fine and plays fine

Chrono Trigger - System loads to a black screen, and plays Spekkio's challenge music from The End Of Time

I have a lot of other games to test out, but this is the general look of things at the moment with those titles... I even deleted my Super Metroid save files (!!!) to see if it was just Save Game corruption, but when starting a new game the intro "Cinematic" has messed up text (text from Samus does not scroll in correctly) and the game freezes/hangs when it shows the "flashback" to Metroid II (where the baby metroid imprints on Samus).

Any ideas or questions? Is my SNES borked? Sadly I have no other consoles around to test carts on, but it seems odd that this many of my carts would be dead or have issues. These carts have been kept in a plastic tote with NES games which work fine on my Toaster NES, so I doubt it's the carts.

Next steps?

And if I'm completely out of luck, what's the best clone SNES to buy to replace it? I know the most realistic answer is to replace it with another Genuine SNES, but I keep getting outbid on eBay, so...