Why Your Famicom's Player-2 Controller Adds Noise — and How I Quiet It

The Famicom's Player-2 controller is the odd one — it has a microphone and a volume slider where Start and Select would be. When a Famicom, or a Twin Famicom, develops a faint noise in its sound, this little controller is a common cause. Here, with photos from the bench, is how I trace it and quiet it.

1. This is the controller to suspect: the Player-2 pad, with a microphone and a volume slider where Start and Select would be.

2. Open it and you meet the microphone — the small silver cylinder — with two fine lead wires running to the board, and the volume slide switch beside it.

3. The trouble usually lives in that volume slide switch. Over the decades its internal metal contacts oxidise and no longer meet cleanly — a poor contact — and that is what you hear as noise in the game's sound.

4. Here is the same switch, seated beside the microphone element inside the shell.

5. I clean it two ways. First I pass fine-grit sandpaper lightly over the contact surface to lift off the oxide. Then I gently raise the metal contact leaf — the springy strip that has to press to complete the connection — so it seats firmly again.

6. Finally I clean the microphone's two lead wires and their solder pads with a little ethanol on a cotton swab. Reassembled, the controller goes quiet.

None of this is difficult. It only asks for a steady hand, and the patience to meet a forty-year-old switch on its own terms.

— Taisei Shimizu, Enjoy Game Japan