So back in June I bought a bunch of games from waterclocker, a dude you may know from eBay. Among them was Contra, which I paid $60 USD for.
I played the game every other week or so since I got it, and now that I moved all my games into my new apartment I tested it out on my Famicom again only to discover an issue I've never experienced before since I got it:
The game refuses to read either of my controllers right. Upon starting the game up, Bill uncontrollably moves to the left as though I'm holding down left on the d-pad. From what I can see, it doesn't matter which of my two NES controllers I use, and this doesn't seem to happen to any of my other Famicom carts.
Is this a known issue? Does anybody have any idea what might be causing this?
Is it just on Contra or does it do it on other games too?
If it does this for all games, the controller port might be dirty.
Well I fiddled around some more and figured out it's not just Contra.
It's actually one of the controllers. Of the two I have, one of them is a little less used and has firmer buttons, while the other is a lot more used and has squishier buttons. For whatever reason, whenever the more used controller is plugged in, be it in 1 player or 2 player mode, the game acts like left is always being held down. It did something similar when I tested it out on Yoshi's Cookie.
Anybody have any idea what would cause a controller to behave this way, and what could be done to fix it?
That's pretty weird. Maybe the pins on the controller are dirty and need to be cleaned? I'm not sure if that would help though because I've never had to clean a controller port or controller plug. :(
I've had controllers like this before. Never tried to repair them, just got rid of them.
Probably the 4021 encoder chip in the controller is shot. I've had a few original Famicom systems with that issue unfortunately.
I still need to try and fix them or swap controllers :P
PS: Thanks for the purchase!
Assuming that is the issue, is there a known way to fix it?
4021 IC costs about $3 on ebay. The swap is really simple.