Donkey Kong Country 2 - SNES Cartridge Repair
I received a Donkey Kong Country 2 NTSC/U cart as part of a SNES cart lot I purchased this morning very cheaply. Unfortunately upon testing the cartridge I found that it refused to work.
I expected it would just be a simple use a rubber to clean the contacts fix. However, after opening up the cartridge I found that there is a crack all the way through the game PCB along several of the edge connector pins:
Using my multi-meter I confirmed that there were broken connections on 5 of the front “parts” side of the PCB and 3 on the rear “solder” side of the PCB.
First to re-enforce the PCB so the crack could not get worse through regular plugging and unplugging, I used small dabs of super (Gorilla) glue on top of the cracks between the pins on both sides and then ran a small amount of glue down the side of the connector.
Once this was dry I added some solder to the damaged pins which was lightly dragged across the pins to repair the broken connections. These were then tested with the multi-meter again to confirm the connections were solid. While quite unnecessary, I also applied a very light amount of solder to the two pins to the side of the repaired ones just to help give the connector a little bit of extra solidity against the crack.
As usual I then just used a rubber to clean up the connector and replaced the CR2032 tabbed battery with a brand new one. For those curious the old one was reading a little low at 2.9v.
I then re-assembled the cartridge, placed it into my SNES and turned it on:
