Discussion N64 Motherboard Exchange

[Noah]

Hi everyone,

As some of you may be aware, @Gman has been making great strides towards getting a new and improved N64 trimming guide released that will be include the PIF relocation. We have both done several PIF relocation trims at this point and are quite confident in the process. However, we've only really been experimenting on the boards we have on hand; namely the lower revisions. As such, when the guide releases, we will only have pictures supporting those earlier revisions (revs 2-4). Obviously we'd like to avoid this and add support for higher revision boards! Recently we purchased a lot of N64 consoles and all of them were the lower revisions so we have a proposition for the BitBuilt community:

If you have a higher revision N64 motherboard (we're only looking for rev 5 or higher) we'd love to exchange motherboards with you! If you're hoping to do the PIF relocation and trim your board on day one of the guide's release then getting your hands on a lower revision console would be the best way to ensure you'll be able to successfully trim your board. In order to document and add support to the guide for the higher revisions we'll need your help. Blindly buying consoles in hopes of scoring higher revisions hasn't been working in our favor so hopefully some of you out there have boards that will help us ensure that the guide covers ALL N64 revisions.

If you've got a higher revision motherboard that's in verifiable working condition please do no hesitate to send Gman or myself a PM or just post here and we'll get back to you!

Thanks! We're looking forward to the wave of N64 projects that will come as a result of everyone's efforts.

 

[Pears]

I'd be willing to help out with a board or two, I've got two 08's and one 09.

Would be nice to have a lower revision board to try a RAM swap sometime, so I was considering trying to pick up a lower Rev on eBay anyway.

 

[Milosonator]

This is great! I'm actually working on designing an N64 portable! I just got my N64 in and tested it, so I can crack it open and see what revision it is, hopefully I can be of help. I'll update this post when I popped it open and we'll see if its of any use. (PAL model that's already certain)
So my board is a NUS-CPU(P)-01. Dual RAM chips. Picture:

 

[Gman]

This is great! I'm actually working on designing an N64 portable! I just got my N64 in and tested it, so I can crack it open and see what revision it is, hopefully I can be of help. I'll update this post when I popped it open and we'll see if its of any use. (PAL model that's already certain)

We were only planning on documenting NTSC motherboard but this could be good. I think there are fewer PAL revisions and the main difference in the motherboard that I have spotted is the use of individual circuit controller buffers, while NTSC uses one quad buffer IC (U8), so I have strong confidence that the trim can be easily adapted for the PAL region.

 

[Milosonator]

If it could easily work for PAL region boards, I'd be more than happy to beta test the trimming guide and report any issues I might have. I checked my motherboard and compared it to NUS-CPU-1, couldn't detect any major differences around U8 or other significant chips. Updated my earlier post with a picture of the motherboard: NUS-CPU-(P)-01.

 

[Gman]

Yup looks virtually identical. What i love about relocating the PIF is that the differences in routing between revisions can be ignored as you wire directly to correct spot. If we get our hands on the PAL boards Noah is going to take professional photographs of them for documentation.

 

[Bob]

I have a revision 7, but it's not working at the moment. The system was working perfectly, and then one day, nothing. Happened to the systems of two of my friends within a month. Tried cleaning them and whatnot, to no avail. Bought two "broken" mobos on ebay and fixed those instead. I was trying the whole "wait a year and see if it decides not to be broken" trick that works so well with N64s.

Anyway, if a non-working board is of interest, let me know.

EDIT: DARN IT, I clearly didn't read the whole post carefully. Sorry. I see now that you only want fully working ones. My bad.

 

[Miceeno]

I've got a 5, 8, and 9.

 

[E64]

I have about 4 or 5 of them I'll check it out when I get home

 

[E64]

I have 2 of the same ones on the left and 5 of the same ones on the right

 

[Aaron Miller]

I've got a Rev 6 I can trade.

 

[Gman]

Thanks for the support guys! We got a handful of rev5s, 7s, and 9s from Shank so along with our bountiful of rev4s that hits all the points we need for N64. We'll let you know if we need any more but that should be enough for us to finish the guide and then we'll see where we're at.