Six Capacitors on a Super Famicom Board

Six Capacitors on a Super Famicom Board

A Super Famicom from 1990 is open on the bench. Its board carries six electrolytic capacitors. Two of them are tired — the tops slightly domed, a faint stain at the base. The other four look fine.

I do not hold the soldering iron. Someone with better hands than mine does that work. What I do is look at the board before it goes to him, and look at it again when it comes back, and decide what should be done in between. On this one I could ask for the two. I ask for all six.

In November 1990, someone at Nintendo chose these six parts. Same voltage rating, same capacitance, same grade — for all of them, including the positions no buyer would ever inspect. They could have saved a few yen there. They didn't. Thirty-six years later that decision is sitting in front of me, and the only honest reply is to match it.

The visible result is the same either way. A console with two new capacitors works today; a console with six works in ten years. Nobody will open this machine again for a decade, maybe two. When someone finally does, the work will still be honest. That is the conversation — not between me and the customer, but between me and the engineer who soldered this board.

So when the console leaves us it carries two acts of care: the one from 1990, and the one from this week. I don't think of the second one as adding value. I think of it as keeping a promise somebody else made first.