fireaza wrote:Would a soldering iron and a de-soldering pump be nearly as good as that item you linked to? I've had some pretty good runs with it in the past.
You can do it with a normal iron and a desolder bulb, but it's much harder. You have to melt the solder then quickly try to suck it up before it hardens. But if you don't do it just right, you wont get all of the solder. This usually leads to having to heat the pin/pad up multiple times. The more times you heat it up, the better chance of breaking it.
With the desoldering iron, the iron tip is the desolder bulb, so you melt and suck in one step. It is so much easier. And really for $12, you can't go wrong. I'll use a bulb for some things, but never if I'm removing a component. I pretty much only use the bulb for removing excess solder. If I'm removing anything that's through hole, I'll use the desoldering iron.
$12 is cheap enough in my opinion, even if you're gonna be using it just the one time, it's worth it. What I will tell you is that those Radio Shack desoldering irons are just as cheap as their regular solder irons. I got a lot of use out of mine, but when I took it apart a while back to clean it all out, one of the screws snapped (common for Radio Shack garbage). It still works, but not the tip is loose in the handle. Still, for $12, I think I got my money's worth out of it. Also, don't expect the tips to last for too long. Plug it in, use it, then make sure to unplug it right away (that will help the tip to last longer).
And on that note, I recomend grabbing a perf board and some cheap resistors or caps or whatever, or maybe even a cheap timing IC. For practice, solder some cheap components to the perf board, then use the desolder iron to remove them. Like I said, heating up the solder pads too many times will weaken them and cause them to break easily. It's better to get your method down pat on some perf board before you try to do it on the SNES/SFC cart.
Just so you can see for yourself, use a perf board with some cheap components and try to remove it with a normal iron and a bulb. You'll see how difficult it can be.
fireaza wrote:I tried de-soldering braid before, could never get it to work properly.
It depends what you're doing, and how you're doing it. I only have a standard copper braid. I only use it for removing excess solder where the bulb wont do me any good. Like surface mounted ICs, if I have to remove a blob of excess solder, the braid is the easiest thing for me to use. For a DIP IC though, it doesn't work too well. But that's because the braid I have is just a copper braid. They make them with flux in them, which will draw the solder into the braid a LOT more. This is what my friend, that I mentioned in my last post, uses to remove DIP components. I've never tried a braid with flux in it, but I've been meaning to pick some up.
fireaza wrote:Is the general rule that you can always use the original Super Famicom version of the game as the donor cart? There's a few more games I'd like to get repos made of, ones that aren't on the Game Repos site, but I know where I can get the original SFC cartridge and the English-patched ROM from.
Yes, you can always use the original SFC cart of a game. There's a couple of rare situations you might come across, but I'd say that 97% of the time they're be directly compatible.
Unless the translation/mod patch specifically states that it changed something like a mapper (changed from LoROM to HiROM for example) or the SRAM size, then the patched ROM will always be compatible with official SFC cart. But I've never actually seen a SNES/SFC patch that changed the mapper or SRAM size.
The only thing you'd run across that would be a slight problem is the board layout. If you're hoping to use the TSOP+adapter boards, you want a PCB with the 36-pin mask ROM socket. Earlier games used 32-pin sockets. You can still use the TSOP, but you'd have to wire in 5 pins. Another situation is that the SFC cart might have multiple mask ROMs, but you're only replacing them with a single memory chip. In that case, you would need to solder a jumper wire or two. But these two situations are rare to come across. I'd say 97% of the time it's just straight forward.
