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I determined that the
Sharp Twin Famicom was working with regular
cartridges. Great. I loaded a disk into the drive,
however, and I can hear the Famicom disk go round
and round, as if not busted.
Here is the first look:

Next, I
systematically disassembled the internals of the
Sharp Twin Famicom. Not surprisingly, I found dirt, cobwebs,
insect larvae, dead insects, crumbs, and dust.
Here is the Sharp Twin Famicom in its primitive and
dirty form:

So, I first
concentrated on the Famicom disk. As I suspected,
the disk belt snapped and turned into a sticky,
rubbery paste, which is a pain to clean but must be
done. This can be accomplished with a small slotted
screw driver to scrap the belt off the wheel and
motor. Next, use some alcohol to clean the remaining
residue.
Here is the Famicom drive. Notice in the lower
left-hand corner that the belt is snapped. The belt
will need to be replaced:

Next, proceeded to
identify the drive controller chip. If the drive
contains the IC7201 drive controller, this drive can
be used to read/write disks with Disk System copy
programs; otherwise, it will contain the IC3206
which is an evil chip that prevents copying of Disk
System disks.
Here are the results (sorry it is blurry):

In case you cannot
see it, it's an IC3206. Bummer!
After some cleaning of the power board and the CPU,
the Sharp Twin Famicom is starting to be restored to
its former glory.
Here is the cleaned audio-video-power board. The
solder connections look great:

Here is the the CPU. I
got rid of the cobwebs and dead bugs:

After cleaning and even more cleaning, I
reassembled the Sharp Twin Famicom minus the disk drive. Look how shiny and
clean it is:

So what is next? I have to replace the drive
belt. I have an extra one in my workbench shop. This will take a some time and
effort to fix -- not difficult but tedious. |